


Carboxylic Acid

by Nalanzu



Category: Green Lantern Corps (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant (Mostly), Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Fluff, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Horror, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 00:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 56,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13624416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nalanzu/pseuds/Nalanzu
Summary: Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner vs. the wackiness and creepy things that are attracted by the GLC.





	1. Thrown

**Author's Note:**

> Repost from 2008-2011 (what do you mean, fandom bicycle, lol). Fits, again, mostly in and around canon events, could be read as a sequel to Acyl Chloride if you squint, consists of a series of more-or-less chronologically arranged and loosely interconnected one-shots. Mostly I just really liked it when Guy owned a superhero bar.

“I’m busy,” Guy Gardner said.  Firmly. The damp cloth in his hand as he polished the bar to a shine that would put most mirrors to shame was a mute testament to the truth of his words.

“The bar is clean, Guy.”  Kyle stood in the doorway, arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently.

“I ain’t done yet,” Guy muttered.  He knew Kyle was planning something – no, not planning.  The appropriate word was “plotting.”  Unless it involved football – something he strongly doubted, given the total lack of the sport on Oa – he wasn’t interested.

Kyle opened his mouth to protest again, but synchronicity intervened in the form of a mixed blessing.  Both of their rings chirped simultaneously.  “Lantern Rayner. Lantern Gardner. Your presence is required.”

One of the neatest tricks the rings performed – in Guy’s opinion – was making the Lantern uniform, which meant no wasted time changing into a spare costume.  Thirty seconds was all he needed to be properly attired and on his way.

“This isn’t over, you know,” Kyle said, giving him a sideways look.

“Yeah, yeah.”  Guy spared a moment of attention to again mentally curse himself for giving in to Kyle’s puppy eyes on that one occasion.  Sure, the kid was cute, and he was a good buddy, and could be counted on in a fight, and Guy was absolutely not interested.  Except that there had been that one time he’d let Kyle kiss him, and although he’d come to his senses before it had gone any farther, Kyle had taken it as a green light.  Guy had been under a continuous onslaught of seduction attempts ever since.

“Lanterns Rayner and Gardner.”  Salaak’s voice interrupted Guy’s thoughts and he pulled up to land lightly in front of his superior officer.  “Sector 314 requires your assistance.”

Prodding for further information got them a bloody revolution on one of the planets in 314, which explained what its Lanterns were doing, and a trail of wreckage possibly connected with one or more members of the Sinestro Corps.

“Go kill the monster, Guy,” Guy muttered under his breath as they sped towards the site of the latest report from 314. 

“Did you say something?”

“No.”  There was no wind in space, although Guy wished there was; it would make enough noise to block conversation, and he didn’t really feel like talking.  That didn’t stop Kyle from trying to strike up a conversation, although he gave up after the twelfth or so monosyllabic reply.

The ‘trail of wreckage,’ when they found it, turned out to be confined to a single planet.  Guy’s ring informed him that the planet, due to an axial wobble, was unable to support long-term life and was currently in the throes of an ice age.

“Then why do we care if someone busts it up?” Guy followed his ring’s directions anyway, landing in what had apparently been a mountain range.  “….oh.”

It looked as if something had ripped the bones of the planet through its skin and battered it with the pieces.  Rubble was scattered haphazardly in a swath miles wide, straight through the only portion of the planet not frozen over.

“Wow.”  Kyle whistled softly, hovering above Guy.  “If this is what the Sinestro Corps’s been recruiting lately, we might have a little trouble bringing them in.”

“This is nothin’,” Guy retorted automatically, although he didn’t think he’d seen anything like this since the League had taken on Doomsday. 

“It went that way,” Kyle pointed out unnecessarily.  Guy could see exactly where the trail was heading.

“Lead the way, kid,” he said, and let Kyle go first.  The trail progressed farther southward – didn’t this planet have any oceans, Guy thought, and then realized that they were frozen over – until it ended in a crater deep enough to crack through the seabed below the ice.  Smoke eddied upwards, dark gray mingling with the white of steam, partially obscuring the depths of the crater.  A tremor shook the earth as it settled against itself, and fresh steam hissed upwards.

“Do you see anything down there?”  Kyle was floating towards the murky bottom of the crater before Guy had a chance to answer.

“MOVE!” he shouted, diving towards a flash of movement in his peripheral vision before he’d had the chance to see it properly.  It moved more quickly than he’d anticipated, and Guy felt the wind of its passing brush his face before it knocked Kyle out of the sky. Green light sputtered out as Kyle fell, and Guy raced to catch him.

Blue sky flashed past Guy’s vision as an incredibly strong hand grabbed his ankle and swung him around.  He reacted instinctively, sending a blast of pure power straight down into what had to be the creature’s face.  It let go, and Guy got a good look at it for the first time.  It was huge, muscled like an ape and grinning through a mouthful of now-broken razor-sharp teeth.  Pale gray skin covered an elongated body ending in a fluted tail and stretched over a pair of gargantuan wings.  The creature’s two sets of limbs both ended in clawed hands, and when it opened its eyes, they burned with a reddish light.

“Ugly motherfucker,” Guy said, and hit it with a giant fist.  It moved with the blow and _smirked_ at him, so he nailed it between two fists and slammed them down towards the ground.  The impact shook the earth again, but the creature wriggled free and flew straight for Guy.  He sent burst after burst of energy towards it, but it dodged more quickly than he could see, and only a quick last-second shield saved him from getting his throat torn out.  The creature had him by the neck with one hand, though, which made the fact that Guy had caught its other three much less comforting.  His own left hand was still free and without breaking eye contact, Guy balled it into a fist and slammed it into the creature’s throat.  Its grip loosened as it doubled over and Guy pulled backwards, catching its fourth hand in another construct.

“All right, you –“ he started.

A whistling sound was his only warning before its tail slammed into the side of his head and Guy was momentarily stunned.  He slipped downwards, the constructs losing shape and fuzzing out. The creature dove for him, top two hands balled together.  Guy checked his fall just in time to see the blow coming, and knew he had no time to dodge or throw up a shield.  In the split second before it hit, something flashed between him and it.  The creature turned and vanished as Kyle tumbled downwards for the second time.  Guy threw out a construct to catch him, watching for the creature.

The ground was less than five feet away when it came out of nowhere, but Guy knew how it moved now.  He threw a wall between himself and it at the last possible moment and let it knock itself into unconsciousness.  Folding the wall around it was easy, and Guy left it in a bubble while he finished putting Kyle down.

“Idiot,” he muttered.  “What kinda dumbass with a power ring uses himself instead of a construct to block a hit?”  Kyle was, thankfully, not dead, but he showed no signs of waking, either, and groaned alarmingly if Guy so much as touched his side.  “Gardner reporting in,” he said into the ring, carefully lifting Kyle into another bubble and towing both towards Oa as quickly as he could.  “Rayner’s down. Requesting medical assistance on return.”

“And the Sinestro?” Salaak’s voice came back.

“I dunno what this thing is, but it ain’t one o’the Sinestros. It ain’t dead either, so I’m bringin’ it back. Gardner out.” 

Towing the bubbles was quicker than riding in one of them all the way back to Oa, but Guy didn’t want to leave Kyle alone.  Basic first aid did not apply when the skin wasn’t actually broken, and Guy didn’t know how to do anything else.  He could keep Kyle immobile, but it seemed pointless, as Kyle wasn’t even twitching.  “Idiot,” Guy said again. For the first time he started to worry that Kyle might die, and the thought was actually frightening.

The creature woke and started throwing itself against the walls of its construct around the halfway point; Guy was tempted to let it break through and see how well it could breathe in space, but decided not to on the off chance that it would not, in fact, implode.  The extra effort he had to spend to maintain the shield around the creature meant that he wasn’t able to keep as close of an eye on Kyle, and he missed it when Kyle opened his eyes.

Kyle’s shout of surprise was harder to miss, but Guy was navigating Oa’s atmosphere at that point and didn’t have much concentration to spare.  “Guy, watch out!”

A poorly defined lance shot from Kyle’s ring towards the creature, surprising Guy enough that both bubbles nearly shattered.  “Cut it out, Kyle!” he ground out, setting the bubbles down, but Kyle had passed out again and his construct dissolved.  Guy let his bubble vanish, too, which the creature apparently took as a sign to rage harder.

“Lantern Gardner, what the hell is that?”  Soranik Natu, serving both as Lantern of Sector 1417 and as medic for the Corps on Oa, materialized behind Guy.

“Fuck if I know, Natu.  Don’t really care.”

“Watch your language,” Natu said absently, a construct folding into place around Kyle.  “I’ve got him.”

Guy watched her bring Kyle into the medical center before taking his pet off to meet Salaak.

The next few hours saw something of a celebrity around the Oan capital – the violently destructive creature seemed to be the last remnant of a species thought dead for thousands of years.  It was not actually sentient, and Guy wasn’t sure what use it was outside of archaeological curiosity.  He turned it over to Sector 318 – the origin of the creature, although no one was sure how it had moved four sectors away – with the warning that if Kyle died he was going to come back and kill it, no matter how important a scientific discovery it was.

“You can chop it up and see what makes it tick if I kill it,” he said in response to 318’s protests and went to see if Natu had finished.

Kyle was awake and sitting on the edge of a hospital bed when Guy got there, and a wave of relief surprising in its strength washed over Guy.  Kyle’s ribs were wrapped tightly, and a bruise was blossoming across the side of his face, but he seemed energetic enough.  “Leggo, Natu.”

“Only if you promise to stay there.”  Natu was physically holding him down, with no apparent effort.

“Will not,” Kyle said.  “I’ve got plans.  That don’t involve being here.”

“I don’t have time to sit here and hold you down,” Natu snapped.  “You’re lucky your insides are still mostly intact, but if you keep moving, one of your broken ribs will more than likely poke holes in something and waste all my hard work.”

“Give her hell, Kyle,” Guy said, grinning. 

“Don’t you start,” Natu said.  “If I’d known you Earthmen would react to a sedative like that, I never would have given it to him.”

“Don’t look at me.”  Guy raised his hands in protest.  “Ain’t my fault.”

“Take him home, then,” Natu said, in a tone that suggested her patience was nearing its end.  “I’m busy and I don’t want to have to patch him up again.”  She narrowed her eyes.  “How does a dumb animal like that get the best of two Honor Guard Lanterns, anyway?”

“I’ll take him, I’ll take him.”  It wasn’t like he couldn’t keep an eye on Kyle and run the bar.  It wasn’t likely to be that busy anyway.

“Keep him still.”  Natu glanced down at Kyle and handed Guy his ring before vanishing into the hallway.

“I can hear you, you know.”  Kyle yawned, covering his face with both hands and wincing as he moved. 

“Yeah, yeah, let’s get outta here.”  Guy pulled Kyle to his feet.  “Or are you sure you don’t wanna sleep here?”

“Nuh-uh,” Kyle said.  “I got plans.”  He leaned against Guy heavily enough that Guy was supporting most of his weight, eyes closed.

“Right,” Guy said.  “Plans.  How about we start back at the bar.”

“The bar,” Kyle said distinctly, “is not part of my plan.” 

“It is now,” Guy told him.  “Can you fly?”  It was a rhetorical question, but Kyle nodded against his shoulder, so Guy put his ring back on.  Kyle automatically manifested his uniform, complete with mask, and Guy constructed a platform to bring them both back to the bar. 

Kyle was quiet enough during the ride back that Guy thought he actually _had_ fallen asleep, but once inside, he stiffened and stepped back.  “No,” he said.  “I told you, this is not in the plan.”

“What plan, Kyle?” Guy re-locked the door and set about checking his stock. 

“The plan was for you,” Kyle informed him, moving slowly to the nearest table and sitting down carefully.  That mostly counted as not moving.

“Uh huh,” Guy said, continuing with his preparations for opening.

“I’ve got a football,” Kyle said, waving both hands around a vaguely spherical piece of nothing.

“The real kind or one of them pansy European ones?”

“The real kind.”  Kyle looked around, as if he expected the football to materialize. Guy wondered exactly what had been in Soranik’s sedative and if it meant Kyle would actually pass out at some point.  While watching him ramble on wasn’t without amusement, Kyle acting drunk was a lot more fun when it actually involved alcohol as opposed to supposedly extinct monsters and broken ribs.

“And what are you gonna do with a football?” Guy asked, humoring him.

“Play football,” Kyle answered, in a tone that clearly said ‘What else do you expect me to do with it?’

“Kyle, you don’t know how to play football.”  Maybe he’d just leave the bar closed this evening.  It wasn’t likely to be busy, after all, and then he could more easily keep Kyle from doing something dumb.

“You’re gonna teach me.”

“You don’t even like football,” Guy said, reiterating Kyle’s answer every time he’d tried to get him to watch a game and trying to divert Kyle from his obvious path.

“But you like football,” Kyle pointed out, as if he’d presented Guy with the answer to the easiest puzzle in the world. 

“That’s nice, Kyle,” Guy said after a moment of squishing the little twinge that had snuck up on him.  “But I’m still not gonna fuck you.”

“You are impossible.” Kyle stared at him with a perfect semblance of total sobriety for approximately seven seconds before standing and moving towards the stairs in the back of the bar.  He made it up three steps before the sedative finally had its intended effect.  Guy, having expected something of that sort, managed to catch him and haul him up to the guest bedroom.  Kyle slept through the entire process, up to and including the removal of his ring in case of nightmares.  (Guy had seen what happened when the ring manifested nightmares. It wasn’t pretty.)

“It ain’t gonna work, kid,” he said before turning off the light, but he left the door open. Just in case.


	2. Not Forgotten

Contrary to what everyone else thinks, Guy remembers every moment of the time he spent in the Phantom Zone, every moment of the seven years he was in the hospital, every moment of the subsequent years he spent being denigrated and disregarded by both the Corps and the hero community on Earth.

He remembers the moment he made the decision to repair the damage done, remembers feeling his thoughts reconnect, his mind stretch out to fill the shape it had been before the Corps pulled it apart, and most of all he remembers finding the shape not what he expected.  Memories he hadn’t wanted then, hadn’t known he’d had, memories he can’t leave behind, they had poked holes and broken corners and he knew then that the man he had been no longer existed.  None of the men he was before then exist.  It was a shock, in a way, but it wasn’t unwelcome either.  He’s spent enough time in limbo to waste any brooding on the past.

The time he spent in the hospital was the worst, really.  He’d felt time passing, measured in heartbeats, blinks, blood moving sluggishly through his limbs and drool trickling down his face.  Hal had visited, periodically, and Guy remembers the guilt that had poured off of him in waves.  Hal never spoke, never touched, barely even looked at Guy.  He had stared out the window, as if searching for the object on which Guy’s unseeing eyes rested, as if he could find absolution by simply knowing what it was.

There was no absolution to be had.

Or maybe Hal had spoken, and Guy just hadn’t been able to hear.  He doesn’t remember hearing anything, which is funny.  Rationally he knows there must have been sound.  Maybe he’d sat there with the sound of Hal’s guilt washing over him, unable to accept it, unable – unwilling to let it touch him.  He doesn’t want Hal’s guilt, not now, not ever. 

That’s not all.  Guy remembers Kari, too, coming often at first but less and less as time went on.  He remembers that she brought him his own clothes, and he remembers that she never ever left anything to make the room feel like a home.  When he thinks about it – on those so rare as to be nonexistent occasions – he doesn’t know if it was optimistic or morbid, and if he’s grateful to her or angry with her about it.  He usually swings towards anger, because by that time she was fucking Hal and it’s just one more thing that Hal took away.  Back then.

Guy doesn’t want to remember.  He doesn’t care.  He’s alive _now_ , and – lessons of repetition aside – the past holds nothing for him.  The present has Tora (I need time, Guy) and Kyle (just leave it alone, Kyle, it isn’t going to work and you’re too good of a friend to fuck this up, but he can’t – won’t say it in so many words) and the bar (break that table, rookie, and you’re paying for it).  The Corps respects him as much as any other Lantern (How about no? How does no work for you, Lantern Gardner?).  Guy just wants to _live_ , and he does.  Loudly, fully, he’s gonna burn brighter than any other star in the sky.   Look, Ma, no hands.

Memories he doesn’t want, memories he doesn’t need.  Usually he manages to forget that he has them, forget that he can’t forget, except for those times when the sky is black and the city quiet and the twist of the skyline is so subtly wrong.  He could count them on one hand and have fingers left over, the number of times he’s drowned in his memories but come out on the other side.  “It ain’t me,” he says softly.  “I don’t need you.”

“You talking to someone, Guy?”

Just like that, the memories are gone, and Guy has called up his uniform and a flashlight, all in the space of about two seconds.  Kyle is blinking, looking like a deer caught in a pair of headlights.  “What the hell are you doing in here?” Guy asks.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Kyle says.

“Try harder,” Guy tells him.  “I ain’t explainin’ to Natu how you busted your ribs all over again.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”  Kyle turns, moving stiffly, and heads back to the guest bedroom. (He’s been there nearly a week now, broken ribs healing with an excruciating lack of speed.  There are two reasons for this.  a) Kyle works at the bar and he’s not getting out of it just because he jumped in front of a homicidal alien in a misguided attempt to save Guy’s life, and b) Guy doesn’t trust him not to do something dumb if he leaves him alone.  He tells himself that he just doesn’t want Natu breathing down his neck if he lets her patient pull some kind of stupid stunt that lands him right back in the hospital.  That woman is a mean hand with a needle.)

Guy follows Kyle into the guest bedroom and glares at him from the door until he’s sure Kyle isn’t going to go wandering around any more.  Then he drags the single chair – he doesn’t know why it’s in there and not down in the bar where it belongs – over to the bed and sits in it.  He just sits, and the memories stay gone, like they’re supposed to.   Guy Gardner lives in the present, heading for the future.  He just needs someone to remind him of it, every once in a while.


	3. The Sun Appeared Dark In My Eyes

“I can’t see.”  
  
It wasn’t the first time.  
  
“ _I can’t see_.”  
  
The first time, he’d woken with his ring on his finger and the world dark. The first time, it had been the execution of a contingency plan (not that there had been a need for the contingency plan, not then), because if Kyle couldn’t see, he couldn’t fight. But Batman wasn’t on Oa, Batman’s contingency plans didn’t reach out here. And probably didn’t involve his power battery.  
  
“I can’t…”  
  
This was different.   
  
Something behind him moved, and Kyle struck out blindly, formlessly, ring generating shapeless energy without thought. There was nothing there, nothing to hit. He’d gone to charge his ring, just like any other day, and the battery had flared into painful brightness. The light had faded almost immediately. Kyle had blinked the spots out of his eyes, and while waiting for his vision to return, had informed Salaak of what had happened. Salaak had confirmed, told him not to move, and broken communication. So Kyle had waited, but the longer he stood in complete darkness, the harder it became to suppress the panic. A power battery misbehaving could be a Sinestro Corps plot, and that was bad enough, but what if he’d done something to sabotage his own battery? Hal claimed he’d pulled Parallax out of Kyle, but some fragment could have remained behind. He couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.  
  
The door was, in theory, easy to locate. Kyle thought he knew where everything in his apartment was, but he tripped twice over something he couldn’t identify and once he walked straight into a table. He hadn’t realized he had so many  _things_. Finally, he thought to instruct his ring to warn him of any obstacles, but by that time he’d reached the door. He groped for the handle, but the door swung outwards before his reaching fingers could do more than brush at it.  
  
“I knew you’d try to pull some dumb stunt.” The voice was unmistakably that of Guy Gardner. “Where d’you think you’re going?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Kyle admitted. He hadn’t thought past getting to the door.   
  
“Yeah, well, stay there. Where’s yer battery?”  
  
Kyle pointed in what he thought was the right direction. “It’s in the –“  
  
“Never mind, I see it.” Guy walked past Kyle, leaving the door open, and his footsteps moved towards the back of the apartment and then returned. Kyle felt a rough hand take him by the arm, just above the elbow. “Okay, kid, let’s go.”  
  
“What’s going on?”  
  
“Some o’ the batteries’ve been going haywire. Couple exploded, a few flashed bright like yours did. Mostly they just fell apart.” The grip on his arm pulled him upward, and Kyle willed his own ring to flight. It was harder than it should have been. He wasn’t sure if the news that it wasn’t just his battery made him feel better or worse.  
  
“I ain’t gonna steer you into a building,” Guy said, still holding him firmly. “Nice’n slow, now.”  
  
“Is anyone else –“  
  
“Might have to take back what I said about Lanterns never getting lucky,” Guy interrupted. “You’re the worst, you and 1501.”  
  
“Who, ah, who’s in 1501?”   
  
“The one whose name I can’t pronounce. The one that’s all wiggly.” That was absolutely not a helpful description. “Her battery exploded. She’s burned, got a broken leg. She’ll be fine.”  
  
Kyle didn’t ask again. Guy led him somewhere, and Kyle was able to follow his prompts – both verbal and tactile – with little difficulty. He appreciated that Guy was trying to create the illusion that Kyle had arrived under his own power, but illusion wasn’t what he needed.  
  
“I see you can’t get enough of me, Lantern Rayner.” Soranik Natu’s voice was light, and Kyle thought she was probably smiling. Maybe.  
  
“I –“ he started, but she grabbed his other arm and pulled him away from Guy before he could finish.  
  
“At least your insides are intact this time,” she said, and now he knew she was teasing him, because she was poking at his freshly healed ribs. They didn’t hurt at all, which was a welcome change from the last time she’d prodded them.  
  
“I’ll be back later,” Guy said, and a gust of wind let Kyle know that Guy had taken off much more quickly than he’d landed.  
  
“I’m all yours,” he said to Natu, trying for a smile of his own. It didn’t feel right, so he gave up trying.  
  
“Lantern Rayner, are you aware that you are wearing your mask and that you’ve removed the openings for your eyes?” Natu asked as she led him inside.  
  
“Sorry.” He hadn’t known; he let the mask vanish.   
  
Several tests followed, time-consuming and periodically interspersed with “Can you see this? Well, how about this, then?” He couldn’t see any of it, although he could sometimes feel the heat on his face. At one point, he could feel Natu fitting something across his eyes and painful warmth flooded out. Kyle tried not to squirm, but the heat and the device both vanished.  
  
“I don’t know,” Natu said finally.  
  
“You don’t know how long it will be?” The voice belonged to Salaak, and Kyle suppressed a violent start. He hadn’t heard the little alien come in.   
  
“I don’t know if he’ll regain his vision at all,” Natu said, and the bottom dropped out of the world. Kyle fought to get his breath and his balance back as Natu laid a hand on his shoulder. Her other hand tilted his chin up, and then brushed across his eyes. He closed them involuntarily and something heavy settled over his closed lids. “Keep that on with your ring,” Natu said softly.  
  
“I see,” Salaak said.   
  
“I’d like to keep him her overnight for observation,” Natu said, and Salaak must have agreed, because the next sound Kyle heard was the door opening and closing.   
  
“Well,” Natu said brightly. “This way.” The room to which she led him was probably normal; Kyle had no idea. Natu brought him around the space once, pointing out where everything was. Kyle thanked her and waited until she left to construct a stick he could use to tap around and re-explore; it was the only way he could think of to keep himself distracted. He learned as much as he could by touch. No matter how much he told himself it was temporary and it didn’t matter if he knew the room or not, he couldn’t stop until someone knocked on the door and told him it was time to turn the lights out.  
  
Sleep refused to come. Kyle sat cross-legged in the center of the bed and used the ring to create constructs of faces. Faces were difficult. He ran his hands over his constructs, trying to translate the tactile information into a visual image. Donna Troy’s face lay beneath his hands, somehow off and refusing to feel right, when a wave of despair swept over him. The construct shattered into shards so sharp he was surprised he wasn’t bleeding before they dissolved.  _Did I do this to myself? Am I trying to keep the pieces of Parallax in me from hurting anyone else, or did I get caught in my own trap? No, that’s ridiculous. Cut it out, Kyle._  He spent the rest of the night with his head on his knees, trying not to think.  
  
Natu arrived some time later. Kyle hadn’t asked his ring what time it was, as if not knowing the time somehow prevented time from actually passing and kept this in the realm of nightmare instead of reality. Someone had come in to bring him breakfast and make sure he could use the shower, though, and broken the fragile illusion, and Natu had come once again to perform tests. Again, he couldn’t see anything, but she sounded more pleased than she had the day before, so he supposed that was something. Then again, she still had no idea what was going on. Kyle could hear voices in the hallway after she left, before they knocked on the door. He could make out Guy’s voice, the words growing clearer as they grew louder.  
  
“-take him back,” Guy was saying. It sounded argumentative, although Guy might have said ‘ornery’ instead.  
  
“You are needed as part of the investigation.” That was Salaak, every soft word precisely enunciated.  
  
“Bullshit,” Guy said. “Point me at something and I’ll hit it, but I ain’t no good at this detective stuff. You don’t need me until you know what we’re up against.”  
  
“This is not a matter up for debate.” The following knock sounded like Salaak, too, soft and decisive.  
  
“Yes?” Kyle answered. He wasn’t sure what it was he was supposed to do, but he ringed his uniform on and was standing when Salaak and Guy entered the room.  
  
“You get a vacation, kid,” Guy said, with the same forced cheerfulness Natu had had the day before.  
  
“You mean I’ve been suspended,” Kyle said flatly. It wasn’t like he hadn’t expected it. He couldn’t fight if he couldn’t see, couldn’t patrol, couldn’t train rookies. There was nothing he could do for the Corps without being able to see, and it was counterproductive to have him sitting around using a ring that could go to someone more valuable.  
  
“Not precisely suspended,” Salaak began.   
  
“No, I’m just useless to you, so you’re going to get rid of me.” Kyle tugged the ring off his finger, feeling his uniform and mask dissolve. “Just take it.”  
  
Someone snatched the ring out of his hand, but it wasn’t Salaak. Kyle had a bare second to process that information before Guy grabbed his other hand and jammed the ring back on. “Quit whining. You’re a senior Lantern. Act like it.”  
  
Kyle turned away, more out of force of habit than anything else, and ringed his uniform back on. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”  
  
Guy stepped closer to him, and Kyle felt the heavy weight of Guy’s hands descend on his shoulders. “It ain’t safe here, Kyle. Something’s trying to take down the Corps from the inside out.”  
  
“I’m a liability,” Kyle said.  _Or worse._  Why sugarcoat it?  
  
“You cut that out,” Guy said, stepping back. “You an’ me are going back to Earth and I ain’t gonna hear any complaints. I’ll come back for you.”  
  
“Whatever.” Salaak wasn’t saying anything, which meant neither were the Guardians and Guy was going to get his way. Kyle didn’t care. Earth or Oa, it didn’t matter. “Let’s go, then.”  
  
Earth was no more than a few minutes away when Kyle discovered that he did care, very much. He didn’t need to see to travel between sectors – the ring did the navigation for him. It informed him of obstacles in his path and gave him clear enough directions to avoid them.  _“Without my eyes, I have nothing.”_  He’d said that, the first time, and he’d never had to disprove it. But he could draw, if he could feel what he drew, and he could paint if he knew what colors he was using. He could create sculptures, assemble objects, express the images in his mind’s eye in three dimensions instead of two. ‘Prepare for atmospheric entry,’ his ring warned him, but Kyle came to a stop instead.  
  
“The hell are you doing?” It had taken a moment for Guy to notice that Kyle wasn’t following him, judging by the delay.  
  
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing.” Kyle crossed his arms. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he could do, but sitting and waiting wasn’t it. Whether or not Parallax was still inside of him, he was a Green Lantern. Besides, his ring was unique, and only worked for him; it wasn’t like they could give it to anyone else. “This is my job just as much as it is yours.”  
  
“And what are you gonna do?”  
  
“I don’t know! But I have to do something.”  
  
“Kyle…” Guy paused, and was silent for so long that Kyle almost asked his ring to locate 2814.3. “You ain’t any better at detective work than I am,” Guy said finally. “And you gotta see something to hit it.”  
  
“You did not just tell me that I’m useless.” Of all the things Kyle had expected to hear, that was not one of them. He’d thought that Guy, of all people, would understand that he wasn’t going to stand idly by, that just because he’d been  _damaged_  didn’t mean he was  _broken_.  
  
“You said it yourself!” Guy shot back, and anger rushed through Kyle.  
  
“So that’s it? So sorry, goodbye, get lost?” Making a guess, he reached out to where he thought Guy was and made a grab for his collar. To his complete shock, his fingers closed on solid material. “I’m not giving up this easily.”  
  
Expecting the next thing he felt to be Guy’s fist in his face, Kyle had already braced himself for the impact when he realized that Guy was shaking. Confused, he let go of the vest. Only then did he hear that Guy was  _laughing_.  
  
“That’s more like it, kid.”   
  
“You…” Kyle exhaled forcibly and ran his hands through his hair to hide the fact that they were trembling. “You did that on purpose,” he said.  
  
“I ain’t got time to coddle you. Besides, you don’ need it.” Guy paused for a moment, and then Kyle felt a hand on his shoulder. “Yer an Honor Guard Lantern.”  
  
“I… thanks.” There wasn’t really anything else he could say.  
  
“Now go down there and stay until I come back fer ya.” The hand on his shoulder lifted away.  
  
“You aren’t serious! You just –“  
  
“Look, I dunno if that’s permanent. You don’t know. Natu don’t know. But you’re part of the Corps whether you can see or not, and that ain’t gonna change.” Guy reached out and physically turned him in a direction that was presumably facing Earth. “I already talked t’Hal. You’re gonna stay with him and see what happens.”  
  
“You talked to Hal.” Kyle had heard him do no such thing. “When?”  
  
“On the way over here. Ain’t no air in space for sound waves, or did you forget?”  
  
“…right.” A deep breath didn’t really change anything, but it helped him feel better. It wasn’t like he really had a place of his own left on Earth, not any more, but he wouldn’t be staying with Hal for long, and if anyone could recognize Parallax, Hal could. “You’ll let me know what’s going on.” It wasn’t a question.  
  
“If there’s anything you can do, I’ll come get you myself.”  
  
“You don’t need to.” He was mostly sure he could make it from Earth to Oa without help, although finding the right place on the planet’s surface might be a little difficult. “Come get me, I mean. Just tell me and I’ll come.” Guy didn’t need to say anything. Kyle knew exactly what he was thinking. “Ring, directions to Coast City.”   
  
The ring tugged him downwards, and he followed the prompting. There were no obstacles he couldn’t avoid on the way down, either, with the ring’s verbal and tactile cues, and as per his instructions, it led him to the sign at the edge of the city limits. Guy had accompanied him, the which he knew because his ring periodically informed him that 2814.3 was approximately two meters away, but he didn’t speak until Kyle had landed. And only stumbled a little. He’d kept one foot on the ground, at least.  
  
“Not bad,” was all he said.  
  
‘2814.1 approaching,’ Kyle’s ring said, just as he heard Hal’s voice.  
  
“Kyle?”  
  
“Hal,” Kyle acknowledged.  
  
“Good luck,” Guy said, and took off so quickly Kyle heard a sonic boom.  
  
“Ow,” he said, rubbing at his ear. “Uh, thanks, Hal, for offering to help.”  
  
“Least I could do,” Hal replied, and there was a long pause. Kyle wondered exactly what Hal was doing, but finally Hal’s hand closed around his wrist. “My car is this way,” Hal said, taking a step and pausing.  
  
“You drove?”  
  
“I didn’t want you to- I mean, I have to protect my identity. If Green Lantern visits the same building too often, people will start to get suspicious.” Hal’s voice was somewhere between reluctant and condescending, all submerged into honest concern.  
  
Kyle suppressed a sigh. This might turn out to be not such a good idea after all.


	4. Guy Gardner and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day(s)

As far as Guy Gardner was concerned, this was not a good day.  Any day a guy got woken up by a crashing sound that turned out to be the expensive plate glass window in his bar downstairs couldn’t really go much farther downhill, he’d thought.  He should have taken it as an omen.  Not that the glass was difficult to clean up, and not that it would have been particularly difficult to fix it with the ring, except that the brawling rookies who’d crashed through it in the first place had proceeded to grind the shards to dust and break a hell of a lot more furniture before Guy grabbed them both by the collar and set them straight.

That was before Kyle had come in and said he was not going to be able to work the bar that evening because the Guardians wanted him off-world for something or other.  Guy hadn’t paid much attention, but what the Guardians wanted Kyle doing was their business.  Anyway, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.  The kid was nice to have around, but not essential, and besides, this would give Guy a chance to figure out how to make the kid stop _hitting_ on him.  It was getting old.

Even Kilowog suddenly being required elsewhere and leaving Guy on rookie-training duty wouldn’t have pissed him off quite so much, usually.  Damn brats didn’t know their way around a ring, and as far as Guy was concerned, Kilowog was leaving them way too much slack.  At least, that’s what he told them, just to see if anyone pissed his pants or tried to run.  No one did, and for a bunch of blithering idiots who apparently couldn’t be bothered to sort their elbows from their assholes, they hadn’t done badly.

No, what really pissed Guy Gardner off was that he had tried to charge his ring and his battery had exploded.  He’d gotten halfway through the charge and it had shivered once before doing a credible imitation of a grenade.  Guy didn’t call himself the best in the Corps for nothing – he managed to contain the blast so completely that barely a whiff of smoke escaped.  That and the very outer edge of the reaction, so that the entire room was now covered in a thin layer of soot.  Guy scooped up the defective battery and stalked off to headquarters to harass Salaak about it.

A throng of Lanterns was already there, mostly rookies, a lot of them the ones he’d tried to beat sense into before his battery had _exploded_. “What the…”  They were all babbling about their own batteries.  Salaak was nowhere to be seen, and neither was anyone else with more than six months experience.  Guy opened his mouth to tell them all to shut the hell up and get themselves organized when something else exploded and the entire group started milling around even worse.  “Dammit,” he said instead, and grabbed one of the rookies who wasn’t as lamebrained as the rest.  “Ask why everyone’s here and make a report to Salaak,” he said. “There’s some weird shit going down.  Figure it out.”

The rookie paled.  “But I –“

“Just do it.”  Guy snatched up another of his trainees by the wrist and hauled him towards the explosion.  The rookie made a sort of undignified squawk.  “You’re with me.”

“Yes, sir,” said the rookie, managing not to make any more un-Lantern-like noises.  Sector 3119, that’s where he was from.

The blast had come from the temporary living quarters; at this time of day they should have been mostly empty, and they were.  They were burning, though, and the flames if left unchecked could devastate the city.  Not that something like that would ever happen.

“Take care of the fire,” Guy said.  “I’ll check for anyone inside.”  The rookie wouldn’t be on his own for long; he’d be fine until a more experienced Lantern arrived.  Guy knew damn good and well there was at least one person in the building – the battery hadn’t exploded on its own – and his ring confirmed an additional two. 

The two bastards unlucky enough to be caught in a building with an exploding battery were easy to get out; if either of them had had any training with their rings whatsoever, they probably would have made it out on their own and rescued the third Lantern to boot. As it was, they were in the midst of staging a heroic and doomed attempt when Guy pulled them unceremoniously outside and went to do the job himself.

His ring confirmed that the Lantern inside was Sector 1501, training complete and slated for participation in the graduation ceremony to take place in two days.  He found her pinned underneath a fallen beam – she’d been able to throw up a rudimentary shield, but the combination of the explosion and the subsequent collapse of the building had knocked her unconscious.  Guy coughed, the smoke growing thicker, and leveraged the rubble off 1501.  Doing so shifted the equilibrium, and the rest of the ceiling promptly fell in.

Guy was more than ready for it, and emerged from the smoke with 1501 safely in a construct and no further damage than when he’d gone in.  Except that now the smoke was even thicker in the back of his throat.  He was going to be tasting it for _days_.

3119 had been joined by several more Lanterns and they had the rest of the fire under their control.  Guy handed 1501 off to someone else and went looking for Salaak.  Salaak found him first, looking as if he wanted to ask what Guy had been doing. 

“My battery exploded,” Guy said.  “That ain’t normal.”

“Yes,” Salaak said.  “We are conducting an investigation.”

“Damn straight,” Guy said, but Salaak talked right over him.  Guy’s job was to contain the panic, not that that’s what Salaak called it, since this was Oa and the headquarters for a group of superheroes supposedly without fear, but Guy figured you call a spade a spade.  Or at least crowd control. 

“It is not crowd control,” Salaak said, infuriatingly calmly.  “You will organize the Corps and prevent further damage.”

It sounded exactly like crowd control, but since it was generally a tossup whether or not arguing with Salaak would get him anywhere, Guy let it go. “Where’s Rayner? Ain’t this his job too?” he asked instead.  If he suffered, Kyle suffered.  That’s the way it went.

“Lantern Rayner also experienced difficulty with his battery,” Salaak informed him.  “He is currently incapacitated, but awaiting further instructions.”

“He what?” Guy said.  “It exploded, too?”

“He is most likely temporarily blinded,” Salaak said smoothly.  “You have your instructions.”

Guy was tempted to shake a fist at Salaak’s retreating back, or throw something, but that usually didn’t do any good either.  Much as he hated it, Kyle was going to have to wait until he could – at least temporarily – delegate his job to someone else.  After a moment’s thought, though, Guy hit on another solution and broadcast a general assembly to anyone not actively involved in containing the several fires which had sprung up around the city.

“Listen up!” he shouted, once he figured enough of them had gotten there.  “You’re all part of a unit.  Get into those units.  NO ONE charge rings at their batteries.  Make sure your area is clear and wait for further instruction.  Don’t do anything stupid.”  The assembled Corps just looked at him, ninety-nine percent rookies and half of them probably doomed to fail before graduation.  “MOVE IT!” he roared, and they scrambled.

Next order of business was Kyle, who was just as likely as a rookie to do something idiotic.  Guy found him trying to walk out the front door, even though it was obvious he couldn’t see a damn thing. His mask completely covered his eyes, for one.

“I knew you’d try to pull some dumb stunt,” he said, and Kyle jumped.  “Where d’you think you’re going?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said, as if that wasn’t obvious.

“Yeah, well, stay there.” Guy peered behind Kyle.  His battery didn’t seem to have actually exploded, but then again, Salaak had said most of them had simply disintegrated.  Kyle’s must have been one of the few that flared.  “Where’s yer battery?”  If nothing else, the damn thing could be examined.

“Up there,” Kyle said, waving a hand vaguely.  “It’s in the-“

Kyle was pointing to a wall.  “Never mind,” Guy told him.  “I see it.”  This was not strictly true, but he had to keep the battery in one of very few places and it was in the first place Guy checked.  He took Kyle by the arm; blind or not, Kyle was perfectly capable of moving his own ass.  “Okay, kid, let’s go.”

“What’s going on?” Kyle wanted to know.

Guy pulled him upwards, explaining as he went.  Kyle balked at flying for the first time ever since Guy had seen him, and Guy snapped that he wasn’t about to steer him into a building.  That got him going, and then he asked about everyone else.  He’d managed to not hear _anything_ , so Guy explained again.

“Who’s 1501?” Kyle asked.

“The one whose name I can’t pronounce.  The wiggly one.  Her battery exploded. She’s burned, got a broken leg.  She’ll be fine.” At least, he hoped so.  He hadn’t dragged her out of the building for nothing.

Someone had to watch Kyle, or he’d try to do something and get himself into trouble.  Best place for that was the medcenter – he’d need his eyes checked anyway.  Soranik Natu – unofficial Lantern medico – was passing by a window, so Guy flagged her down and pointed to Kyle.  After handing the kid over, he told Kyle he’d be back later and took off.

The rookies – and what experienced Lanterns were on the planet – had put out the fires and the city looked more or less normal. Guy instructed anyone who asked to carry on as usual, but stay alert, and went to find out if there was anything for him to blow up.  Funny, but an attack – this couldn’t be anything else, not unless the Guardians had fucked up bigtime – usually came along with some nutjob in a cape grandly taking the credit for it.  So far, there was nothing.  Guy idly wondered if maybe Hal had taken a dive in the Central Battery again, or if someone else had.

Someone had put out another general bulletin – all personal batteries were required for examination, and the rings were to be charged directly from the Central Battery, which would apparently not blow up or disintegrate or blind every Lantern on the planet who actually had eyes.  Or an eye.  (There was at least one that didn’t.)  Guy spent most of the night enforcing curfew and trying to dispel rumor, but morning saw him with the assignment to assist in the investigation.

“How about Kyle?” Guy asked, again.  This stuff was more up Kyle’s alley than his.  Barely.  Besides, Salaak was heading to the medcenter anyway.  Guy tagged along.

“As the extent of his injury remains unclear, he will be relocated to Sector 2814,” Salaak said.

That was going to go over real well.  “I’ll take him,” Guy said.  Finding out what to hit was not his strong point, and Kyle was less likely to be pissy if Guy was around to smack him out of it.

“No,” Salaak said.

“I’ll take him back,” Guy said, a little more loudly than he’d intended.

“You are needed as part of the ongoing investigation,” Salaak said.

“Bullshit,” Guy said.  “Point me at something and I’ll hit it, but I ain’t no good at this detective stuff.  You don’t need me until you know what we’re up against.”

“This is not a matter up for debate.”  Salaak knocked on a door, which turned out to belong to Kyle.

“Yes?” Kyle answered.  Salaak pushed the door open, and Guy saw Kyle on his feet and waiting, mask still covering his eyes.

“You get a vacation, kid,” Guy said, trying to put a good spin on it.  Yeah, like that’s gonna work.</i>

“You mean I’ve been suspended,” Kyle returned, sulking already.

“Not precisely suspended,” Salaak began. 

“No, I’m just useless to you, so you’re going to get rid of me.”  Kyle all but threw the ring at Salaak, his uniform and mask melting away.  “Just take it.”

Salaak was reaching for the ring, but Guy got to it first and put it back where it belonged.  “Quit whining.  You’re a senior Lantern. Act like it.”

The uniform reappeared, but now Kyle wouldn’t look at them, not that looking would have done him any good.  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“It ain’t safe here, Kyle.  Something’s trying to take down the Corps from the inside out.”  This was doubly true if Kyle was just going to sulk instead of figure out how to be productive.  Guy put his hands on Kyle’s shoulders, trying to get him to cooperate.

“I’m a liability,” Kyle said, and Guy lost his patience.

“You cut that out,” he said, stepping back.  “You an’ me are going back to Earth and I ain’t gonna hear any complaints.  I’ll come back for you.”

“Whatever.  Let’s go, then.” 

Salaak rolled his eyes and waved Guy out of the room.  This counted as one of those times arguing was not, in fact, completely and totally pointless.  Guy still thought Salaak had some sort of tally running, of when to let things go and when to be anal retentive.  Or maybe he just flipped a mental coin.

The trip back could be taken at the rings’ top speed – Kyle, despite his sulking, figured out that he could get the ring to give him appropriate directions and Guy only had to nudge him out of the way of giant flying rocks once or twice.  He also took the opportunity to warn Hal and John that their batteries might be screwy – John said he’d gotten the memo – and tell Hal he was going to have a houseguest.  He didn’t figure Hal would mind – much – and Hal agreed without too much bitching.  Guy was already entering Earth’s atmosphere when he realized that Kyle had stopped following him.  “The hell are you doing?”

“I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

_Fine time to find your backbone again_ , Guy thought, and started arguing.  It didn’t take more than a couple of not-so-subtle nudges to remind Kyle that he was not a rookie, and that he probably wasn’t useless either.  Guy wouldn’t have done it on a normal day, but he figured being told he might be blind for life was enough to get Kyle thirty seconds of slack.  And then he was going to start kicking his ass.

Hal showed up on time for once, so Guy left the two of them to it and raced back towards Oa.  He hadn’t gotten any messages, but he could always hope there’d be something to either hit or blow up by the time he got there.  If not, Guy supposed he could find something just fine.

Much to Guy’s disgust, the entire matter had been resolved by the time he touched down.  A rookie who’d flunked out apparently had an overzealous fanbase; the rookie herself (she was a model, of all things) had been perfectly reasonable about the entire affair and returned home, no hard feelings.  A group of her fans, however, had been furious at the perceived injustice and started plotting revenge.  Usually, shit like that stopped right there, but every so often, some morons got their hands on magic or technology and created a problem.  In this case, the geeks had gotten their hands on some bits and pieces of the original Oa and used it to hack the Central Battery.

That was what Guy got out of the horribly long and convoluted explanation, anyway, delivered to him via Kilowog in Guy’s very own now-cleaned and repaired bar.  That and there wasn’t anything for him to hit. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“Sorry, buddy.”  Kilowog shrugged, massive shoulders rippling.

“That entire mess was just because of a bunch of fanboys?”  Guy threw himself into a chair opposite his friend and rested his chin on a fist.  “What a bunch of bullshit.”

“It could have been worse,” Kilowog reminded him, and Guy sighed.  Any day everyone woke up alive and stayed that day was a good one, he supposed.  But he really wished he could legitimately hit something.  He looked at Kilowog and grinned.

“Wanna spar?”


	5. Together Alone

Kilowog hates the silence.  Everyone knows it.  They all know he lost his people – not once, but twice – and that the company of aliens isn’t even a pale shadow in comparison.  Even so, he goes out of his way to find company and stay with it.  It’s part of the reason he trains the new recruits; he’s never alone.  Even though he’s a damn good geneticist and was known among his people for his finely trained academic mind, these are qualities he rarely puts forth in the Corps.  Working in a lab is too quiet.

Surprisingly, Kilowog has met a number of people he is proud to call friend.  Many of them are from Earth, and he even considered spending the rest of his life there during one of the times the Corps was having trouble existing. (Kilowog isn’t sure how, exactly, the Corps has held together for supposedly billions of years when it’s collapsed twice in the last decade alone.  He supposes they’ve had lots of practice.)  One of them is now smirking across a table and wanting to spar.

“I’ll kick yer ass, poozer,” Kilowog says, accepting the challenge.

“If I win, you pay your bar tab,” Guy Gardner tells him, and Kilowog stretches his face into the human approximation of a smile. It isn’t easy; his muscles don’t work that way.  But he learned, because he wants to show courtesy.  Courtesy is important.

Important, unless one is training raw recruits (who wouldn’t know their asshats from their elbows, which is supposedly a common saying on Earth, even though Kilowog hasn’t heard anyone except Guy use it.  Guy could be pulling his leg) or teaching a former recruit and current pain in the ass the difference between a drill sergeant and an Honor Guard Lantern.

Namely, the former will pound the latter into paste nine times out of ten.

By mutual agreement, they take their sparring match to the central training ground; it’s supposed to be empty of rookies at the moment anyway, which it is, but they’ve picked up a small crowd of the curious and the bored by the time they’ve been at it for about fifteen seconds.  It’s also raining, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone.  Usually the Guardians don’t let it rain, but now it’s just pouring down.

Kilowog could crush Guy, if he could just get his hands on him, but Guy’s too slippery.  He bounces and dodges, for all his talk of fighting straight on, “like a man.”  Guy is as direct a person as Kilowog has met, outside his own people, but the Bolovax Vikians all shared the same consciousness, more or less, so it isn’t a fair comparison.  Guy mostly says something and then does it.  Kilowog appreciates this.  What he does not appreciate is Guy’s dodge _just_ past his reach.  He’s doing it on purpose.

“Come and get me,” he taunts, and flicks water at Kilowog’s eyes.

Time was when Kilowog would have been genuinely infuriated; despite Hal Jordan’s impressive performances as a Lantern (before, during, and after Kilowog trained him), the man didn’t exactly inspire likability, nor did he predispose anyone else to feel affectionate towards humans.  They were so… unpredictable.  Furthermore, one of Kilowog’s very first interactions with Guy was a deadly serious fight over politics, of all things.  Kilowog simply hadn’t realized that humans were so _adamant_ in their support or opposition regarding the direction their governments took.  He supposed it was a natural side effect of not sharing a mind – how could you know that you were heard? – but he’d still been surprised.  And to be physically attacked?  Outrageous.

In the end, though, Kilowog had found that there really wasn’t much difference between human political groups, no matter what their individual adherents wanted to think.  He’d almost left Earth altogether, but it held much of what remained of the Corps and therefore what remained of Kilowog’s life.

If anyone had told him that he would develop a friendship with Guy Gardner, he would have told them they were clearly insane.  But something about Guy’s pigheaded stubbornness – even if he was damn closeminded about it – and his purely physical prowess awoke a sliver of respect for the man, and his straightforwardness was like a breath of fresh air.  Even if he couldn’t believe a word anyone else said, Kilowog knew that Guy Gardner would pretty much say exactly what he thought and to hell with anyone who thought differently.

Honesty, however, did not a Vikian make.

Guy’s smirking at him now, from just out of range.  Kilowog leaps forward, and he knows he’s won, because Guy has forgotten how quickly Kilowog can move.  Guy knows it, too, because he has a look of shock on his flat, pale human face just before Kilowog lands directly on top of him.  “Got ya,” he says.

Guy mumbles something that might be “You fought well” and might also be “Go to hell.”  Kilowog thinks it’s probably the latter, but he climbs off Guy and pulls him out of the mud.  The rain’s already washing the sand out of Guy’s hair. “Beer’s on you,” Kilowog says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Guy grumbles. 

The bar will be crowded within minutes after opening; between the rain and the recent crisis avoided, the Lanterns will be gathering indoors, and there are only two places to do that. Guy’s bar is by far the more congenial, and also, Salaak avoids it.  That alone would endear it to most of the Lanterns in the city.

Kilowog helps Guy set up for opening, listening to the sound of the rain.  This silence he doesn’t mind so much, the companionable silence of having nothing to say.  It took him a while to learn.  He uses his ring to set up the chairs more quickly (Guy is giving him that look) and the boom echoes through the walls.  “Only you, ‘Wog,” Guy says, removing his fingers from his ears.  “You gotta explain that sometime.”

That the sound is a memorial to his fallen people, those he lost not once but twice, is something that Kilowog will never explain.  He just shrugs in reply and flips the sign in the window to open. He doesn’t like silence, but there are a few things that are better left unsaid.


	6. Cell Phone Protocol

Three steps to the left, avoid the armchair, then five steps forward and a quick right turn around the floor lamp, followed by a straight shot to the front hallway. The doorknob presented itself under his questing fingers, and Kyle felt around for the locks. There were two – one on the doorknob itself and a deadbolt above it. Making sure he had both keys in his pockets, he unlocked the door and opened it as quietly as possible. There was no sound from the apartment behind him, and he suppressed the urge to ask his ring for the whereabouts of Lantern 2814.1; Hal would hear him if he spoke.  
  
The door closed quietly, without a squeak. Kyle had taken care of the worn hinges with a simple construct. He slid the keys into the locks, one at a time, and then fled down the hallway. Once he was out of hearing range of the door, he instructed the ring to enact the cell phone protocol, and constructed an earpiece. Turning a construct a color other than green wasn’t easy even when he could see it; blind, it was incredibly difficult.   
  
Difficult did not equal impossible.   
  
“Ring, is anyone in the hallway?” he asked quietly.  
  
“Negative,” the ring replied through the earpiece.   
  
“Directions to the nearest set of stairs.”  
  
Thirty minutes on foot saw him to his studio, a fresh cup of coffee in hand. After three weeks in Coast City, Kyle and his dark sunglasses were a familiar sight in the coffee shop around the corner. The studio itself was a small room that was usually part of a Ferris Aircraft storehouse; when Kyle had professed himself bored to tears after three days patiently waiting around Hal’s apartment, Carol had taken pity on him and offered the space.   
  
“I’ll pay rent,” Kyle had said hastily.  
  
There had been a moment of silence, and then Carol had laughed. “Keep an eye on the place,” she’d said. “We’ve got some sensitive equipment in there.”  
  
Kyle had blinked, somewhat nonplussed. The ring had confirmed, via the earpiece, that she was telling the truth; her vital signs showed no indication of the stress caused by lying.  
  
“Your ring,” Carol had said. “It matches Hal’s. I know what you can do with it.”  
  
“Ah,” was the only answer Kyle had been able to muster for a moment. “Thanks,” he’d added. Setting up a construct around the building to serve as a perimeter alarm had been easy; it wasn’t a large warehouse to begin with, and Kyle was getting better at using constructs to follow and identify surfaces. Making it permanent enough to stick around until he actively dismissed it wasn’t difficult, either.   
  
“Hello,” he murmured at the empty room. The ring buzzed quizzically at him, and he dismissed the earpiece. After three weeks and no sign of his sight returning, Kyle was beginning to be sure that it was never coming back. He’d hoped that the ring could heal the damage to his eyes, but nothing had changed, and he was starting to consider the implications.  
  
The possibility that Parallax was still twined into his soul was one that Kyle couldn’t dismiss out of hand; no matter what Guy told him about fanboys hacking the batteries, he could have sabotaged them himself without knowing it. It wasn’t likely, just not impossible. If that was the case, he was better off staying quietly away from Oa in particular and superheroes in general until he was more certain.  
  
“Are you there?” He thought he could hear his voice echoing off the walls and giving him an idea of how the room was shaped, but it could just as easily have been wishful thinking. Either way, the block of soapstone in the center of the room was as he had left it. He ran his hands over the surface, remembering its contours and the shape he wanted to coax out of the stone. Losing himself in the act of creation was reassuring – Parallax engineered destruction.  
  
“There.” His tools lay within easy reach, their heft and weight already becoming comfortingly familiar. He’d thought about using his ring at first, but it felt like cheating, somehow. So did using the ring to get around; he usually used the stick he’d forgotten in the studio the day before.   
  
“So what do I do with you?” he asked the ring, picking up a hasp and smoothing out a rough patch. “Not much use to the Corps like this. Then again, no one else can do anything with you.” The ring didn’t try to give him an answer.  
  
“Thought you were over that bullshit,” said a familiar voice, and Kyle grinned.  
  
“Guy,” he said. Somehow being around Guy was reassuring as well.  
  
“Hey, kid.” Guy had been visiting periodically, never staying long, and Kyle had learned to expect Guy at the studio rather than Hal’s apartment. “How are you?”  
  
Kyle shrugged. “Learning judo.” He wasn’t the only blind student in the class.  
  
“Oh yeah?” Guy moved restlessly around the room. “Since when?”  
  
“A couple days ago.” Kyle turned to continue facing Guy, who made enough noise walking that Kyle could probably have followed him blind and mostly deaf. “I don’t know if I can go back to the Corps, Guy.”  
  
“Ain’t what you said three weeks ago,” Guy countered.   
  
“I’ve had a lot of time to think.” Kyle gave up trying to keep up with Guy and returned to the soapstone.   
  
“You ain’t the only one that can’t see, y’know.”  
  
“Guy,” Kyle said patiently, “I know the one you’re talking about and he didn’t have eyes to begin with. I have to learn to do everything all over again.”  
  
“Seems like you’re doing okay so far,” Guy grumbled, and the sound of shifting cloth told Kyle that Guy was not only crossing his arms, but that he wasn’t wearing his costume.   
  
“You’re the only one who thinks so,” Kyle muttered, picking up a chisel.  
  
“You having some kind of trouble with Jordan?” Kyle could tell that Guy was leaning forward, now, voice just barely louder. The brush of Guy’s shoulder was another dead giveaway.  
  
“No, not trouble. It’s nothing.” It was a small chisel and the chips it knocked off were correspondingly sized. “You’re wearing shoes, right?”  
  
“Of course I’m wearing shoes,” Guy said, somewhat impatiently. “I can see the floor, kid, I’m not going to step on your rocks.”  
  
“Okay, okay, just checking.” Kyle tapped the stone, carefully, and brushed away the flakes. Some of them stuck to his skin, and he brushed his hand off against his pants.  
  
“You’re changin’ the subject.” Stone crunched under Guy’s feet.   
  
“Uh-huh,” Kyle said. “I still can’t see,” he added softly. “This might be permanent.”  
  
After a long enough pause that Kyle wasn’t sure whether or not Guy was still there, a heavy hand descended on Kyle’s shoulder. “So?” Guy said.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“So?” Guy repeated, and a sudden change in air pressure gave Kyle just enough warning to duck. He brushed against the stone, just barely, and realized he’d forgotten to make sure he didn’t smack into it.   
  
“You hit me,” he said indignantly.  
  
“Missed,” Guy said. “Nice work.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove.” Kyle moved to put the fledgling statue between himself and Guy, very well aware what Guy was doing. The stone was warm under his hands, smooth and flat on the as-of-yet untouched surfaces and rougher where he’d been working.  
  
“Nothing,” Guy said, and another shift of cloth indicated a shrug. “See you next time I’m in the area,” he offered.  
  
_Because Earth is so very near Oa,_  Kyle did not say. “See you,” he said instead.  
  
“Oh, there’s a message from Salaak. The Smurfs want you back in two weeks.” Kyle couldn’t actually hear the ring sparking, but the sudden wash of almost-heat told him that Guy had probably manifested his costume.  
  
“With or without my eyes?” He held up a hand to forestall whatever it was that Guy started to say. “Two weeks. Got it.”  
  
Once Guy had gone, Kyle stood next to the stone, one hand absently resting on top. Paranoia was paranoia, after all. Parallax hadn’t stayed in Hal, and there wasn’t really any reason to think there was anything wrong with him. He firmly suppressed the niggling threads of doubt. “I suppose,” he said to the ring, “if no one else can use you, I’d better relearn how.”   
  
The apartment was quiet when Kyle opened the door, but that didn’t necessarily mean Hal wasn’t in it. Weekends did occasionally mean that Hal stayed in. Very occasionally. “Hal?” he said, just in case.  
  
“There you are!” Both worry and relief were evident in Hal’s voice, although Kyle could tell that he was trying hard to suppress both. “I was wondering. Um. Are you hungry?”  
  
“No,” Kyle said. “I…” He was suddenly unsure of how to phrase his request; he wanted Hal to help him retrain. If he admitted it to himself, he wanted to gain at least some measure of proficiency before practicing with Guy.  
  
“I made coffee,” Hal said, coming towards Kyle. He grasped Kyle’s elbow, gently but firmly, and steered him into the kitchen. Kyle knew very well exactly where the kitchen was, not to mention every other piece of furniture, as long as Hal didn’t move things around, but he let Hal guide him. It was easier than arguing.  
  
“I could drink coffee,” he said with a half-smile. Hal led him to a chair and Kyle stifled a sigh. He sat down and waited, thinking that if Hal didn’t believe he was capable of getting himself a cup of coffee, he wasn’t likely to agree to be a sparring partner.   
  
“Here.” Hal sat down across from Kyle. “What did you want to talk about?”  
  
“How did you…” Kyle wrapped his hands around the coffee mug, letting its heat soak into his fingers, and gave Hal a real smile. Hal could be perceptive enough to notice the obvious, sometimes. “I need a sparring partner,” he said, speaking so quickly his tongue tripped over the words.  
  
“Sparring?” Hal repeated. Kyle could picture his expression – dubious and possibly suspicious.  
  
“I have orders from the Guardians,” he said. “I’m reporting to Oa in two weeks. I’d like… I want to be prepared. Just a little.”  
  
“You can’t,” Hal said, a little blankly, and Kyle was suddenly furious. All the doubts, determination, fears, hopes of the past weeks were no longer balled into a tight knot – they filled his veins and fed the flaring anger.  
  
“Don’t –“ he started, but the sound of ceramic shattering and the sudden spill of hot liquid scalding his hands cut him off. He shoved his chair backwards, rising to his feet just as the first drops of coffee hit his legs. Pain lanced through his hands, and he knew and didn’t care that not all of the wetness covering his palms had come from the broken cup. “I’m sorry,” he said through clenched teeth, hands still shaking with now-fading fury.   
  
There were towels in front of the sink, and Kyle reached for one. He managed to pull it free before Hal could do it for him, and he set about soaking up the spilled coffee.  
  
“Let me see your hands,” Hal said gently.   
  
“It’s fine,” Kyle said. One of the shards of the cup slid off the table and fell to the floor, breaking again. “It’s…”  
  
“Let me see,” Hal said again, turning Kyle’s hands over and pulling the towel away. “Wait for a minute.”   
  
It was more than a minute before Hal returned, but Kyle waited, concentrating only on breathing slowly. A cool wet cloth across his palms brought him out of his attempted meditation. He hissed slightly as Hal tugged at something in his left palm and the sharp ceramic grated against his already abused skin.   
  
“Doesn’t look so bad,” Hal murmured. “This might sting a bit, though.” The fizz of peroxide did indeed sting, but Kyle held his hands steady. “Hold still.” Something tugged and stuck to Kyle’s left palm first, and then his right, and Hal wound gauze around just the left hand. “All better. Don’t touch the coffee,” Hal added. “You’ll get it all wet.”  
  
“Oh, fine.” Kyle held his hands up and listened to Hal throwing broken bits of the mug into the trash and wiping down the table. A wet thud told him that Hal had pitched the towel into the sink, and a few moments later Hal had set another mug of coffee down on the table in front of him.  
  
“It’s okay,” Hal said, earnestly. Kyle’s hands tightened around the second mug just slightly before the twinge in his palm reminded him to relax.  
  
_Patience_ , Kyle reminded himself. “Sorry,” he said again. “Never mind,” he added after a moment. “I’ll ask someone else.”  
  
“About what?” Kyle almost couldn’t believe that Hal actually sounded genuinely confused, as if he’d completely forgotten the conversation of fifteen minutes before.  
  
“A sparring partner,” he said patiently. “I need practice.”  
  
Hal took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.   
  
“Won’t know unless I try, right?” Kyle tried smiling, but he wasn’t sure whether or not he’d succeeded.   
  
“Okay,” Hal said. “Let’s go.”  
  
“What, now?”  
  
“Do you have other plans?”  
  
“Well, no.” Kyle ringed his costume on, assuming Hal was doing the same. He couldn’t feel the wash of energy from Hal the way he could from Guy, but he didn’t know why. “Ready when you are.”  
  
“Ready.” The ring let him follow Hal out the westernmost window, and then northward out of town. “Okay,” Hal said, after several minutes of apparently random directional changes. “Describe your environment.”  
  
The ring told Kyle they were in a national park, in a clearing in the midst of a heavily wooded area. He relayed the information.  
  
“Details,” Hal said impatiently. “You have to sense your environment, be able to use it.”  
  
“Details,” Kyle muttered. The ring could only give him so much information verbally, but maybe he could work out some kind of tactile system. He wiggled the ring experimentally and listened for Hal. Over the course of the next several days, Hal brought him to a variety of different locations, but he wouldn’t let Kyle use the ring to create a construct. It was frustrating, on one level, but eventually he could accurately analyze even a changing environment with the ring.   
  
“Don’t you have to work?” Kyle asked on the third day, which was a Monday and theoretically the start of the working week. Hal told him that he’d taken the week as personal time and not to worry about it. By this point, part of Kyle was beginning to wonder if John might not make a better sparring partner after all, or Ollie, or anyone but Hal and his complete focus. He told that part of himself to shut up and appreciate Hal’s considerable determination.  
  
The morning of the fourth day, Kyle woke to see bright sunlight shining through the window. For a moment, he simply stared, and then rubbed his eyes. The light didn’t change, although little sparkles appeared at the edge of his vision. He bounded out of the bed and ran to the window, throwing it open and peering outside. The sun flared across his vision, too brightly to see through. Kyle shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting and trying to make something out. The light only got brighter and brighter, searing into his brain, and he squeezed his eyes shut, turning away from the sun. It followed him, burning, and his hands in front of his eyes made no difference.  
  
At the moment the pain of vision began to slide into the physical pain of burning flesh, Kyle screamed and woke. For a very brief moment, a glimmer of something moved at the edge of his sight, but it was gone almost before he noticed it. His head ached dully in the aftermath of his dream, and his ring informed him that it was just past six in the morning. Too restless to sleep, Kyle made his way into the bathroom for a shower and the kitchen to make coffee. He was sitting on a windowsill, holding a still-full cup of cooling coffee, when Hal walked up to him.  
  
“Looks like rain,” Hal said, and Kyle knew his voice well enough now to know that Hal wasn’t facing him.  
  
“Could be,” Kyle said, and realized that his face was damp. He scrubbed it dry and took a sip of the coffee, grimacing at the temperature. “Early start today?” he said, putting the cup in the sink.  
  
“Sure,” Hal said, hesitating so infinitesimally that it was almost unnoticeable. “Just give me a few minutes.”   
  
Kyle’s monosyllabic assent was cut short by an emergency signal from both his ring and Hal’s, informing them of an inbound threat.   
  
“Stay here,” Hal snapped, and leapt out the window.  
  
“Like hell,” Kyle answered, and followed. The ring told him that the threat in question was of unknown origin and unknown capabilities, and it was hovering over the recently rebuilt Coast City. Kyle heard a thud as Hal barreled into whatever it was and sent it spinning away from the city. The scent of smoke registered and Kyle tracked it to a possibly overturned car, nothing alive inside. It was hot to the touch, but he surrounded it with a bubble and let it burn itself out before racing after Hal again.  
  
Whatever the intruder was, it appeared that Hal had the situation well in hand. The intruder was apparently caught in a bubble construct, although Kyle couldn’t tell whether or not it was still conscious.  
  
“Everything okay?” Kyle called.   
  
“Fine,” Hal called back, and Kyle’s ring informed him of an energy surge building within the intruder.   
  
“Hal, watch out,” he started, but the surge spiked into a full-blown explosion before he could get the words out. There was no sound, no change in air pressure, but Kyle could feel the edges of the explosion lapping against the hasty shield he’d instinctively manifested. When it faded, the intruder and Hal were both falling. Kyle raced downwards, using Hal’s ring as a beacon. He felt his fingers close around Hal’s wrist and pulled out of the dive, toes brushing the ground.   
  
“The  _alien_.” He’d forgotten the intruder. With not enough time to locate it, Kyle tried to create a broad construct over the ground below, soft enough to absorb the alien’s fall without killing it, expecting to hear a sickening crunch at any second.  
  
“Missing something?” He couldn’t quite place the voice at first, and concentrated instead on getting Hal down to the ground. “Kyle?”  
  
“John?” Hal was completely limp, but Kyle could feel his pulse beating steadily. “That you?”  
  
“Is something wrong?” The ring confirmed his guess, indicating that John was landing not far away, intruder caged and no odd energy spikes this time.   
  
“Yeah, I, uh, still can’t see.”   
  
“Ah,” John said tactfully. “Were there any other hostiles?”  
  
Kyle shook his head. “Just that one. I don’t know who he is or why he was here.”   
  
“I’ll make sure he gets where he needs to go,” John said in answer to the question Kyle hadn’t asked.   
  
“I’ll take care of Hal, then.” Kyle didn’t need to see the construct to create it, now; Hal was surrounded in an oblong bubble that resembled nothing so much as a Watchtower life pod before he could blink. “Watch out for weird energy spikes,” he added. “The ring should give you a warning.”  
  
“Thanks,” John said. “Give me a call if you need anything.” He took off without waiting for an answer, alien – or was it an alien? Not that it really mattered – in tow.  
  
After navigating the streets of Coast City by stick, having the ring guide him to the orbiting Watchtower was no challenge at all. He made a brief report on the way in, brought Hal to the infirmary, and waited. Hal showed up with no apparent side effects shortly afterwards, reluctantly admitting on the way back to Coast City that Kyle was supposed to keep an eye on him for any untoward developments. The mystery intruder had been soaked in an unfamiliar type of mystic energy and was currently the subject of both some rather heated debate and intense study.  
  
“I mean –“ Hal said, stuttering. “Just to make sure,” he ended lamely.  
  
“You don’t have to avoid the word eye,” Kyle said, honestly amused. “Don’t worry. I’m sure nothing’s wrong.”  
  
“I’m not worried,” Hal said, just a little too quickly.  
  
_Right._  Kyle mentally shook his head; sometimes he forgot that Hal was very much the product of an earlier generation, one in which men were expected to project at least the image of strength. “I’d be a little nervous, if it was me,” he said, trying to offer an out.  
  
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Hal said, sounding a little peeved.  
  
“Right.” On the other hand, it was entirely possible that Hal really wasn’t worried at all, and the rest of the trip went by in silence. It wasn’t until they were already on the ground and out of costume that Kyle thought of another question. “Do you mind if I bring some stuff from the studio into the apartment?” It had been a while since he’d been able to work on his sculpting, and it didn’t look like he’d get to work on it today, but there were some smaller projects he’d been wanting to try.  
  
“The apartment?” Hal said blankly. “Oh. I, uh, have to study for an exam, actually, so if you wanted to go to the studio, I’ll just go with you.”  
  
“Exam?” Kyle tried very hard to keep the skepticism out of his voice.  
  
“Hey, it’s not easy flying planes.” That was a slightly defensive tone if Kyle had ever heard one. “I have to renew my certification every so often.”  
  
“I guess being dead didn’t help either,” Kyle said, smiling.  
  
“Very funny,” Hal muttered. “Let me get a couple things and we’ll head over to the studio – you did want to go now, right?”  
  
Between finding Hal’s manuals and remembering that neither of them had eaten that day, it was a while before they got to the studio, and Kyle couldn’t quite recall the impression of the project he’d been considering. Vaguely irritated at the loss of the mental image, he glared at where he thought the soapstone statue was before picking up a hasp.  
  
“Dammit.” He didn’t think he’d been working with the soapstone that long, but the weird dreams and the lingering uneasiness from Hal’s alien were enough to throw him off. He couldn’t concentrate on the image he wanted, and after a while he gave it up before he managed to ruin the sculpture entirely. “Hal?”  
  
Silence answered him. Given that his ring had confirmed Hal’s presence in the next room over, a lack of response was definitely odd. It occurred to Kyle that it had been a while since there had been any sound from the other man. “Dammit,” he said again, and threaded his way through the studio as quickly as he could.  
  
Hal was slumped over his binders when Kyle got there, but according to the ring all of his vital signs were perfectly normal. “Hal? You awake?” Kyle reached out and shook him. For a long moment, Hal didn’t respond, but then he twitched and sat bolt upright.  
  
“Whe- Kyle?” He cleared his throat. “Sorry, I must have dozed off.” He stood up, the sound followed by little cracks that told Kyle he was stretching. “This does not count as an untoward development,” he said suddenly. “Perfectly normal.”  
  
The thought hadn’t even crossed Kyle’s mind once he’d realized Hal was just asleep. “Of course it’s normal,” he said, and forgot about it. “Let’s get out of here.”  
  
For the second day in a row, bright sunlight shining through Kyle’s eastern window woke him. Unlike the previous morning, vision was not a dream. He stared at the bright rectangle of light until his eyes watered, squinting at its blurry outlines. Exultation soared through him, pure joy making him almost dizzy in its intensity. “Hal!  _Hal!_ ”  
  
“What?” Hal skidded into his room, ring flaring a bright green. Kyle grinned at the sight, at not needing his own ring to tell him that 2814.1’s power levels had spiked in preparation for combat.  
  
“I can see!” Kyle bounced off the bed and threw himself at Hal in an exuberant hug. Hal staggered slightly under the assault and patted him gingerly on the shoulder.  
  
“That’s great, Kyle.” His voice was as warm as his physical response was hesitant.  
  
“Am I interrupting something?” It was Guy’s voice, and Kyle could see him standing in front of the window. At least, he could see a blurry outline.  
  
“I can see!” Kyle repeated, letting go of Hal and leaping towards Guy. The redhead caught him by the shoulders, laughing.   
  
The Watchtower medical bay (the second time in two days) wasn’t the first place Kyle had wanted to go, but he had to concede that tests of his returning vision were probably a good idea. Guy followed them up there, but couldn’t stay for the results. He gave Kyle a quick hug before he left, and Kyle couldn’t help feeling a flutter that had nothing to do with whether or not his vision returned completely.  
  
Several hours later, though, he was beginning to think that he should have just hid when Hal insisted that he have his eyes checked again, regardless of Guy agreeing with him for once. At one point, even Hal got bored enough to fall asleep in one of the chairs littering the waiting areas of the medical bay. Finally, Kyle was sent back with instructions not to strain his eyes and to check back in periodically. Once back in Hal’s apartment, he found he couldn’t concentrate on anything. All the resolutions he thought he’d come to, all the adjustments he thought he’d made, they’d fallen apart. He found that he was desperately excited at the thought that he might be able to see again, that he wouldn’t have to adjust to missing one of his senses entirely. Just over a week until he was slated to return to Oa suddenly seemed far too long a time to wait.  
  
“Quit pacing,” Hal said, the sixth time Kyle walked into the coffee table and cursed. “Are you bruised yet?” he added.  
  
“Funny.” Kyle rubbed his knee. “You haven’t been moving the table around, have you?”  
  
“Describe your environment,” Hal retorted.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’ve been so excited about getting your sight back that you’ve forgotten everything you learned.” Hal caught him by the shoulder and Kyle felt his knee just brush the edge of the coffee table. “Describe your environment.”  
  
The exercises in perception seemed like such a waste of time. Kyle gave Hal a perfunctory answer, tapping his foot impatiently. He was going back to Oa, back to being Guy’s partner. He’d spent enough time edging forward and then back, wasted enough time in gingerly stepping around what he really wanted. If he didn’t tell Guy directly how he felt, there was no chance of anything happening at all. “Seize the day,” he said softly.  
  
“Kyle, focus!”   
  
He didn’t  _want_  to focus, but he put aside his excitement. It was an act of will, after all, and will was what a Lantern did best. “Okay,” he said.  
  
“Excellent.” Hal clapped him on the shoulder. “Coffee?”  
  
“Yes,” Kyle said gratefully. Caffeine was probably the last thing he needed, but coffee was the lifeblood of the soul.  
  
“Coffee it is.” Hal vanished into the kitchen, and Kyle tried to focus his senses enough to track Hal’s movements without resorting to either the ring or removing the dark glasses he’d been instructed to wear until further notice. He was listening to the liquid sounds of coffee pouring into the first mug when a resounding crash abruptly overwhelmed all the other sounds. It was followed by silence broken only by dripping liquid.  
  
“Hal?” Kyle dashed into the kitchen, directing the ring to detect anything abnormal. It told him there was nothing unusual, which in and of itself was enough to make him skid to a halt. “Hal?” he said again.   
  
Following his automatic prompting, the ring gave him a summary of the kitchen – it  _was_  perfectly normal, except that Hal was lying prone on the floor near a puddle of swiftly-cooling coffee. Kyle reached out, checking first for a pulse, barely aware of the liquid soaking into the knees of his pants. Hal was alive, pulse strong, airways clear, and breathing regular. Only at that point did Kyle think to ask the ring to check Hal’s vital signs; it told him that Hal was asleep.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle said to it. It requested clarification of his request. “Reaffirm analysis,” he said. It repeated the precise phrases it had previously used. Kyle shook Hal’s shoulder, trying to wake him. “Hal.” A glass of ice water, a few loud noises, and a slap later, Kyle was starting to get seriously worried. “This counts as an untoward development,” he told Hal, and contacted the Watchtower. The medical bay for the third time in two days was definitely some kind of record.  
  
“He what?” Guy said disbelievingly, some several hours later.   
  
“Aftereffects,” Kyle said, peering around the doorframe more out of force of habit than the ability to see anything clearly. Judging by the rustling of paper, Hal was poring over some kind of manual, ostensibly studying for a flight exam. “Some kind of weird magic. It should wear off in a few days. No problem.”  
  
“And John can’t babysit you guys because?” Guy dropped his bag on the floor of the guest room.   
  
“It’s not babysitting,” Kyle muttered, resisting the urge to rub his eyes. He’d asked that Guy be temporarily reassigned; he didn’t know why they’d acquiesced, but Guy would be staying until Hal was better or until Kyle was due back on Oa, whichever came first.   
  
“Right.” Guy snorted, dismissing his uniform and manifesting into what was probably a worn pair of jeans and an old Warriors t-shirt.   
  
A soft thunk from the living room told Kyle that the assassination-by-magic aftereffects had struck again; his ring confirmed that Hal was unconscious. “Twenty minutes on his first try.”  
  
“Oh, joy, Hal Jordan fended off a magic spell for twenty minutes.” Guy stretched, joints popping, and padded over to the door.  
  
“I wanted to talk to you,” Kyle said quickly, before Guy could walk past him. He didn’t need the ring to tell him that Guy had stiffened warily, or that he was opening his mouth to speak. “Just hear me out. Please.”  
  
There was an almost inaudible sigh, and then Guy turned towards him. “Okay, kid. Shoot.”  
  
A deep breath did nothing to steady his suddenly shaky nerves, and he resisted the urge to scrub his palms on his jeans.  _Just don’t babble, Kyle,_  he told himself, and started talking. “Look, if you tell me that you don’t want it, that you’re not … I mean, that’s okay, and I’ll respect it, I promise, it’s just that, well, I don’t know how to say it, really, but you… I don’t want… I’m not afraid or anything like that, but with what we do, I don’t want to have any regrets, but I really will understand if you don’t –mmf!” The spill of words he couldn’t shut off came to an abrupt halt as Guy reached forward and pulled him into a rough kiss.  
  
“Shut up, kid,” Guy growled into his mouth, and Kyle willingly obliged. It was far too soon when Guy pulled back, although one strong hand remained cupping the back of his head, fingers moving so slightly through his hair. “You ready to listen?”   
  
Kyle nodded.  
  
“We’ll see where this thing goes, okay?” Guy tousled his hair and slipped out the door before Kyle could form an answer, not that it would have been particularly coherent. He still hadn’t managed to move when Guy stalked back into the room a few moments later. “And I ain’t moving in with you when we get back to Oa.”  
  
Paralysis finally broken, Kyle grinned. “Fair enough.”


	7. To Have and To Hold

"Yes, but is it poisonous?" Guy poked the ring, holding it above the glass the bartender had sworn was the house specialty.

_Substance is not toxic to humans,_  the ring said, sounding as if it wanted to say something else.  
  
"Score." The alleged house specialty was an unhealthy shade of cyanotic blue with grayish undertones. Kyle wasn't entirely certain it was edible at all, no matter what the ring said.  
  
"You know, in my experience..." he started. It was the wrong thing to say; he knew it as soon as the words left his mouth, but the pleasantly fizzy pink liquid in his own glass had already twisted his tongue around more than he cared to admit.  
  
"You ain't got experience," Guy said. "Not in this, anyway."  
  
"I do so," Kyle returned hotly. He  _had_  done his fair share of interstellar barhopping, mostly while trying to either find his way home or recruit a new Corps (the first being an entirely traumatic experience and the second being the result of ill-advised naiveté that had nearly gotten him killed, not to mention the many aliens who'd died or been otherwise hurt as a result). And now his thoughts were wandering. He pulled them back just in time to see Guy down at least half the glass of chalky bluish gray liquid.  
  
This being the seventh and last day of their week off, Kyle had a fairly good idea of how Guy and unfamiliar intoxicants mixed together, and he braced himself for the inevitable. The progression of events usually went something along the lines of Guy Gets Drunk followed by Guy Starts Bar Fight followed by Kyle Gets Bruised (Or Worse).  
  
Clenching the hand under the table discreetly into a fist, Kyle was therefore thoroughly unprepared for Guy's actual reaction. He started  _giggling_.  
  
"Oh god." Kyle buried his face in his hands, his mostly empty glass tipping over to shatter on the floor.  
  
Guy looked up at the sound and smiled, his face so open and warm that Kyle was caught and held by it. He couldn't help smiling back, and Guy's expression lit up even further. With one swift motion, Guy reached across the table and caught Kyle by the closer hand, pulling it towards him and stroking his thumb suggestively across Kyle’s palm.   
  
Just as Kyle started to clasp Guy's hand in return, he became aware of an expectant hush in the room. He glanced around to see the entire bar - small though it was - staring intently at both of them. "Ring, what exactly are the effects of this... this compound on humans?"  
  
His ring rattled off a multisyllabic chemical name before informing him that the substance reacted with the peculiarities of human biology to form a rather powerful aphrodisiac. Kyle resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands again, made easier by Guy’s iron grip. "Oh god," he said again.  
  
"You usually don’t say that until after I get you home," Guy said, and his voice was just blurry enough that Kyle wouldn't quite have known he was intoxicated if he hadn't seen Guy drain the glass.  
  
"Ring, stop translating Lantern Gardner's speech. Make his stop, too."  
  
"Well?" Guy said, as if he’d asked a question which Kyle was failing to answer.  
  
Kyle glared at the bartender. "You knew that would happen."   
  
The bartender grinned and shrugged. "You didn't ask, and first-time patrons are fair game. Green Lanterns or not."  
  
"Ass," Kyle muttered, and vaulted over the table. Whatever was in  _his_  glass hadn't fuzzed his head up badly enough to interfere with his coordination, and the bartender flinched back. Half the bar's patrons started getting to their feet, some of them suddenly sprouting blunt weaponry. A few of them had pointy bits, too, which was absolutely not what Kyle had wanted out of the evening. His ring sparked as he instinctively reacted to the suddenly charged atmosphere, and the tension in the room quadrupled.  
  
“A joke is a joke,” the bartender said, clearly trying to defuse the situation, but protective shielding slid over the breakables on and behind the counter. Kyle started to try to explain that he had no interest in starting a fight, but he didn’t get the chance.  
  
"You're wasting time, Kyle," Guy said, and he was smirking now, eyes glittering with pure unadulterated lust.   
  
"You shush," Kyle told him, and Guy  _wriggled_  in his seat.  
  
"Hit me, baby," he said. "Make it  _hurt_."  
  
That was so unexpected that Kyle froze. "What?" he said, and one of the other patrons took advantage of his distraction to swing a chair at his head.  
  
Letting the chair shatter against a hastily-erected smooth shield, Kyle pulled Guy to his feet. Guy staggered and leaned against him, one hand reaching around Kyle's waist to squeeze his ass. "Guy, move your hand." He had to say it, even though he knew it wouldn't do any good, the green shield looping around to form an actual protective wall complete with turrets and stonework. As if the first chair thrown had been some kind of signal, the entire bar devolved into a riotous melee - from the looks of the place, this wasn't exactly unusual.   
  
"I'm thrusting my massive--!"   
  
The rest of whatever Guy was shouting was lost in the general sounds of the general destruction around them. Kyle gave thanks for small blessings, shrank the shield wall, and vacated the premises with as much haste as possible. Figuring that leaving the outpost entirely was probably in their best interests, he grabbed Guy from behind and aimed for the stars as soon as they were out of the building.  
  
"Now," Guy growled before they had cleared the atmosphere, somehow managing to press himself even more closely against Kyle.  
  
"Not now," Kyle returned, because Guy's grinding made it even harder to think than it already was.   
  
" _Now_ ," Guy repeated, and Kyle closed his eyes and prayed for patience, or at least strength of will.  
  
"Ring, where's the nearest uninhabited planet with a breathable atmosphere? And survivable temperature? Any size, as long as it won't kill us." The ring rattled off a set of coordinates, and Kyle went at the ring's top speed. He had just enough presence of mind to confirm that the planetoid was safe enough before landing and letting Guy have his way.  
  
_Some time later._  
  
Kyle woke to cold rocks digging into his ribs and a human leech firmly stuck to his side. The sky overhead was a rippling slate gray, and he wondered for a moment where the ceiling had gone before remembering the bar from the previous night. “Hey, Guy.”  
  
“Not the rabbits!” Guy sat bolt upright, shoving Kyle into a particularly pointy rock in the process. “Wait, where are we?”  
  
“Rabbits? No, wait, never mind.” Kyle stood, kicking a rock for good measure, and pulled Guy to his feet. “We’re…” For the first time since awakening, he realized that he did not recognize their surroundings.  
  
The rippling sky overhead capped a rectangular courtyard, surrounded by oddly regular hills on three sides and some kind of structure on the fourth. The trees dotting the end opposite the structure only added to the sense of artificiality – pale globes of light were strung through their branches, although there were no visible strings or cords. An erect stone disc bore far too much resemblance to an oversized gravestone for Kyle’s comfort, particularly since they’d been lying right in front of it. A row of stone lanterns – three in total – stretched across the courtyard in front of the stone. A gap in the row proved to be the source of the rocks that had been digging into his ribs.   
  
“Were those glowing a minute ago?” Guy asked quietly, and Kyle saw with a start that the lanterns were shining brightly. He couldn’t look directly at the light, but the sense of wrongness suddenly crystallized.  
  
“No,” he said. “But they aren’t casting any shadows now.” A quick glance upwards showed that the overhead lamps weren’t either.  
  
“Where did you say we were?”   
  
“I… I have no idea. Ring?” When the ring failed to respond, Kyle looked down at his hand to make sure that it was still there. The ring was both on his finger and glowing a faint but reassuring green. Kyle poked it with his other hand. “Ring, where are we?”  
  
“Lemme try.” Guy got no better results.  
  
“Let’s get out of here.” Something about the courtyard was still bothering him, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. “We can get our bearings in space and head to Oa from there. We’re already late.”  
  
“Yeah, okay.” Guy looked up, but his feet didn’t leave the ground. “The hell?”  
  
“Oh, don’t tell me.” Kyle tried to will himself into the air, but it was as if the ring had no power. “Hell of a time to run out of juice.”  
  
“Wouldn’t be glowing if you were out of power.” A railed platform attached to a pale green pole materialized out of Guy’s ring, but it was translucent and dissolved as soon as Kyle touched it. “You try.”  
  
Creating the construct was more difficult than anything he’d done since first getting the ring. The constructed jet refused to gel at first, finally solidifying with a painful snap. Kyle touched the side; it seemed solid enough until he tried to move it, and then it dissolved into smoke. “Great.”  
  
“Screw this.” Guy stalked across the courtyard towards a gap in the wall on the right. It led to a stone staircase angling sharply to the right again and then downwards; the courtyard walls turned out to be constructed of stone on the outside. The stones themselves were irregularly shaped and simply fit together to take advantage of their natural shape. Kyle wondered for a brief second why the wall didn’t collapse without some kind of concrete keeping the stones in place before shoving the irrelevant thought aside. After no more than a few meters, the stairway swerved sharply to the left and ended abruptly.  
  
“Is that solid?” The bottom of the stairwell formed a perfect line with the outside of the courtyard, as far as Kyle could tell, but what had not been clear until they reached it was that nothing outside the courtyard was visible. All he could see past that line was an almost blinding white.   
  
“Only one way to find out.” Guy reached forward and the bottom dropped out of Kyle’s stomach.  
  
“Don’t touch it!” He couldn’t explain the sudden vertigo or the pain that spiked through his skull as the direct result of Guy’s nearly touching the doorway, but the closer Guy was the worse it got.  
  
“What?” Guy paused and half-turned to face him. “You okay?”  
  
“I… fine, but stay away from that light.” Guy frowned at him and reached out, glove fading. Kyle looked at him, puzzled, as Guy touched his upper lip.   
  
“You’re bleeding,” Guy said, and his fingers were red as he pulled them away.  
  
“I’m what?” The nosebleed had stopped as suddenly as it had started, and Kyle scrubbed away the remnants. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Let’s try the gate.”  
  
The boxy shape opposite the standing stone hadn’t borne a resemblance to anything in particular the first time Kyle had looked at it, but as he walked towards it the silhouette became almost familiar. It looked like an open gate in an almost medieval wall topped by a peaked tile roof. The wall itself was white plaster and darkly painted wood over a stone base, and for a moment, Kyle paused to appreciate the aesthetics.   
  
“Stop standing there and let’s go,” Guy growled, and Kyle suppressed a flinch. How long had he been still?   
  
A dirt road was visible through the gate, curving to the right and leading away from yet another stone wall. The wall supported a tower of the same construction as the gate, but the image faded as soon as Kyle got within arm’s length of the opening. The same white light as before filled his vision, nearly close enough to touch and oddly hot.  
  
“Stop,” Guy said from behind him, and Kyle froze. The barest hint of red was just starting to trickle from Guy’s nose, his face otherwise white. Kyle backed away from the gate, and the color returned. “Look at the sky.”  
  
The rippling dark had faded to the same disquieting white, and the prospect of trying to jump off the outer wall was losing what little attraction it might have had. “Maybe there’s some kind of radio equipment in there,” Kyle said, looking at the tower. He hadn’t noticed it before, jutting towards the sky from the corner of the hill, but now it easily dominated the courtyard. Three levels of white plaster and dark wood supported a roof of glimmering gray tile, and he could see that a corridor connected the lower level with the gate.   
  
“Probably not,” Guy said, but he started up the narrow stairway leading from the courtyard to the base of the tower.   
  
“Or we could see farther from up there.” If nothing else, the tower’s height should give them a decent view of the surrounding area; it was the tallest object in the immediate area.  
  
“Nothing to see,” Guy said, almost too quietly for Kyle to hear.   
  
The door, when Kyle reached it, was locked, but it was fairly simple – if not particularly easy – to break the lock with a construct. A small entryway, barely large enough to justify its own existence, stood on the other side of the door, leading into a wooden-floored room empty except for a staircase in the center. White shone through the barred windows, illuminating a second door leading towards the gate.  
  
“I’ll go up. You take the door.” Guy was bounding up the narrow stairs before Kyle could answer.  
  
The door slid open onto a dark hallway. Kyle edged forward, constructing a flashlight that took far too much concentration, but the hallway was simply empty. It led straight to another wooden door, dust lying thickly across the floor. His footsteps kicked up a cloud, motes whirling through the uncertain light of his construct. The door itself must have been brown once, but now it was a fuzzy grayish-white. Kyle reached toward it and tugged. It didn’t budge, and it took a moment before he thought to slide it sideways – like every other door in this odd tower, it had no hinges. A shower of dust filled the air, and he sneezed.   
  
The room behind the door must have been directly over the gate, Kyle reasoned. Pale light shone in through the barred windows on both sides of the low-ceilinged space, illuminating an odd assortment of items. Something about it looked odd, and he had to think for a moment before he realized that the room was not only free of dust but looked as if someone had been inside it only recently. The neatly folded bedding in one corner was wrinkled with use, and the writing desk next to it was stained with ink. An array of bottles in various colors and shapes filled the outer wall, some of them full or partly full of liquid, all of them glistening as if they’d just been scrubbed.   
  
“The tower’s empty,” Guy said from behind him, and Kyle flinched. He hadn’t heard Guy’s footsteps. “What’s in here?”  
  
“I think somebody lives here, but the dust…” None of the dust from the hallway had floated into the room, but it was still clinging to the inside of his nostrils. Kyle rubbed at his nose absently.  
  
“What dust?”  
  
“The dust in the hallway.” Across the room, a small three-legged brazier sat innocuously against the wall. Kyle crossed the floor and put his hand on the side; it was just barely warm, and he was suddenly aware of how cold the room felt.   
  
“There is no dust in the hallway,” Guy said, and Kyle forgot about the brazier.   
  
“It was full of…” His voice trailed off as he pushed past Guy only to see that the hallway was just as clean as the room. “There was… Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing here we can use.”  
  
“Damn cold in here,” Guy muttered, and Kyle was intensely grateful that he wasn’t imagining everything.  
  
“Yeah,” he said, and slid the door shut behind them. The tower wasn’t much warmer than the room had been, although Kyle was sure he didn’t remember quite this level of bone-chilling cold when they’d first come in. “What’s in the tower?”  
  
“Stairs and empty rooms.” Guy left the door to the entryway open, and Kyle reached behind him to shut it. “I couldn’t see anything from the windows except this place.” It got warmer as they went down the stairs into the courtyard, and Kyle walked to the center of the open area before speaking.  
  
“Damn.” Before he could say anything else, Guy grabbed his shoulder and pointed at the window.   
  
“Did you see that?”  
  
“See what?” The window led into the room they’d just left, the room with a single door and dust that wasn’t really there and might have had someone living in it.  
  
“In the window,” Guy said, just as something bright flashed from between the bars and Kyle heard a sharp popping sound. “Get down!”   
  
Something warm was spreading over Kyle’s shoulder, and he reached for it with his other hand, but a second shot rang out and Guy dragged him in an uneven line towards the far end of the courtyard, towards the huge gravestone.  
  
“Move it!” Guy was behind him now, staying between him and the shooter, but his construct shield was pale and insubstantial. Kyle threw a glance over his shoulder and the light in the window flashed again. A red line scored along Guy’s side, but he didn’t so much as flinch. A shape slowly coalesced in the window and Kyle knew with unshakable certainty exactly where the next bullet was aimed. He poured his will into the ring, creating what should have been an impenetrable wall, and tried to push Guy to the side.  
  
The bullet ripped through the construct, melting it in its passage, and Kyle could almost track it as he failed to move quickly enough to stop it. It buried itself in Guy’s chest just as they reached the gravestone, and Kyle had just enough momentum to drag Guy behind it.  
  
“No, no, no, no.” He was barely aware of his frantic litany, hands shaking as he pulled Guy’s vest and shirt aside. Blood welled up, pumping out in a horrible rhythm. The ring was no help; everything he made went to pieces and faded before he could use any of it, and finally he just pressed his hands over the wound, trying to stem the flow. “Stop, please, Guy.” It was so red, so bright, and when the flow eased he was at first relieved. “Guy?”   
  
It was at that point that Kyle realized that Guy’s heart was no longer beating, and something in him switched off. His hands were steady as he finally created a successful construct to apply pressure to the no longer bleeding wound and started CPR. There was no response. The sound of further shots ringing out registered only faintly, as did the footsteps crunching on the frozen ground behind him.   
  
“Kyle!”  
  
The voice was familiar, and Kyle belatedly recognized it as Hal Jordan, but he didn’t have time to answer Hal’s questions. He had to take care of Guy. The slap came as a surprise, and he fell silent.  
  
“There’s nothing more you can do,” Hal said gently, and Kyle almost hated him for it. “Let me take you home.”  
  
There was no sign of an alien and Kyle didn’t ask what Hal had done with it. He didn’t want Hal touching Guy, either, not even with the ring, although constructing a protective box -  _coffin_ , his mind supplied – was both more difficult than it should have been and easier than he was expecting.  
  
“Let’s go,” Hal finally said, and Kyle found that he could fly under the ring’s power after all. The planet vanished behind them, and he resisted the urge to smash it to pieces.  
  
The bitter cold did not abate as they moved towards Oa, and the next thing Kyle saw was a white ceiling. Heat lay over him, beautifully warm, and for a moment he had no idea where he was. Pain lanced through his shoulder as he tried to turn his head and memory crashed back. “Guy?”  
  
“Hey, there.” The crimson-skinned face that appeared over him belonged to the Corps’ resident medical expert, and she gave him an easy smile. “How do you feel?”  
  
“Where’s Guy?” Kyle struggled to sit up, and succeeded. His shoulder was weirdly stiff, and he could see a bandage out of the corner of his eye.  
  
“Easy there. You’ve got a bit of a dent.” Soranik was still smiling gently. “What do you remember?”  
  
“I…” Kyle rubbed his eyes. “There… we found…” It was so blurry. “There was a tower, and a courtyard, and a sniper. “  
  
“Lantern Jordan found you both on a restricted planet, Kyle. How did you get there?”  
  
“I’m… not sure.” The clearest part of his memory was the bar they’d visited on the last night, and just trying to find somewhere safe to let the effects of the alien chemicals wear off.   
  
“You had traces of…” Soranik went on for a few moments about what she’d found in his bloodstream, and Kyle waited impatiently for her to finish. Once she did, he swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Where do you think you’re going?”   
  
“Where’s Guy?” Kyle asked again. He thought he remembered that Guy had been shot, and that he’d been unable to save him, but that was ridiculous, because Guy was too good of a Lantern to let himself get killed on a tiny little backwater hunk of rock that didn’t even have a proper name.  
  
“Oh, Kyle.” Soranik’s eyes were far too compassionate, and Kyle pushed her aside as he stood. The room tilted for a moment and then steadied, and he moved toward the door. “Kyle, wait.”  
  
“No,” Kyle said, although he wasn’t sure which of Soranik’s statements he was denying. “No.”  
  
“Sit down.” She steered him back towards the bed, and Kyle let her push him carefully downwards. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
The emptiness he’d been trying to hold back settled into him, and Kyle closed his eyes for a brief moment.  _I let it happen again. Never again._  “I see,” he heard himself say.   
  
“Are you all right?” Soranik looked worried, eyes searching his face for something and not finding it.   
  
“Thank you.” He was calm; he couldn’t have wept or raged even if he’d wanted to. There was simply nothing left, nothing to burn. “Is there a—“ Despite his resolve, he couldn’t stop his voice from catching, and changed his question. “Did I miss the memorial service?”  
  
“It’s this afternoon,” Soranik told him. “You’re free to go, but I’d like to give you a thorough examination before you do.” Kyle nodded; he had no objections, and perhaps agreement would be enough to clear the worry from her eyes.   
  
Following the physical, Soranik gave him a conditional clean bill of health; the condition was that he check in on a regular basis. He agreed again, and she returned his ring. He felt a dull flare of surprise that he hadn’t realized it was missing, but it didn’t quite penetrate the numbness. The wound in his shoulder closed under the ring’s influence, knitting itself together at a speed that was no longer quite human. He let it work for a moment, and then manifested his uniform.  
  
A twitch from Soranik almost piqued his curiosity enough to ask, but she was staring at him with narrowed eyes and he was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.   
  
“That’s not your usual uniform,” she said, and he glanced down despite himself to see Guy’s vest. He almost changed it back, but the subconscious choice was appropriate.   
  
The sight of Honor Lantern Rayner wearing Honor Lantern Gardner’s uniform at the memorial service for the same raised more than a few eyebrows – or their equivalents – but there were no objections. Green Lanterns paid their respects to the dead in their own ways, and for once Kyle was grateful that the sheer diversity of the Corps meant that almost no one would question him.  
  
Salaak drew him aside after the service, his alien face set in an oddly warm expression. “I realize this is not the best time, Lantern Rayner, but there is a situation requiring your attention.”  
  
“Even a minute’s too much to ask around here.” Guy’s voice was as clear as if he were standing right next to both of them, and Kyle looked around for the source. Someone had to be playing a prank, and it was in remarkably poor taste.  
  
“Lantern Rayner?” Salaak had gone from sympathetic to suspicious in a matter of seconds, transition so smooth Kyle suspected the sympathy was nothing more than a mask. He couldn’t have heard the voice, or there would have been a very different reaction. Salaak might not have liked Guy, but he wouldn’t have permitted such blatant disrespect to pass unremarked.  
  
“You didn’t hear…” He shook his head. “What’s the situation?”  
  
There was nothing out of the ordinary – Kyle went to the sector in question, assisted the Lanterns there, and returned home. Soranik was none too pleased to see him in the medical bay bare days after he’d been discharged, and she made that fact very clear.  
  
“Explain to me again how you managed to let a spiderform close enough to do this much damage.” She hadn’t used any anaesthetic (which he was sure was intentional), and she was pulling much harder than he thought was strictly necessary.   
  
“There were a lot of them,” he said, wincing just slightly. It didn’t really hurt that much, but Soranik glared at him anyway.   
  
“1688’s report said you sustained these injuries during an unnecessary pursuit.” She sounded casual, but the slight twist to her mouth said she was baiting him on purpose.  
  
“1688 has had his ring for a grand total of three weeks,” Kyle snapped back. “I hardly think he’s qualified to determine whether or not the pursuit was necessary.”  
  
“She.” Soranik tugged at the thread with considerably more force and Kyle twitched. “1688 is female.”  
  
“Fine. She. She’s still only had the ring for three weeks.”  
  
“She has good instincts,” Soranik said mildly. “As do most Green Lanterns.”  
  
“I’m the one with experience here, and in my opinion, it was necessary to prevent the spiderforms from returning and setting up another colony.”  
  
“Uh huh,” Soranik said, and cut off the last thread. “Leave those in until I take them out. Spiderform venom has some unpleasant side effects, but the antitoxin in the stitches should counteract it.”  
  
“I could have done this with the ring,” Kyle muttered, pulling his shirt down.  
  
“Leave the patching up to me this time. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to hold your own guts in, I’m sure.” She handed him his vest, and he shrugged it on. The gashes over his ribs really hadn’t been that deep, except for the last one; the spiderform had gotten a lucky strike and it had found a gap between his bones.   
  
“Aye, aye, ma’am.” He flashed her a smile; it was getting easier all the time, and he was finding that he was less likely to be subjected to dubious looks – or worse – if he smiled.   
  
Nine days and four assignments later, Salaak showed up at his door at the crack of dawn. Kyle stumbled downstairs on far too little sleep and waved Salaak inside.  
  
“As you know,” Salaak started.  
  
“Well, that ain’t good,” Guy’s voice said. It was starting to become normal; what was now the most stressful part of hearing his dead lover in his head was not answering it when other people were around. Hearing voices no one else could when one was not actually a meta of some sort was usually a bad sign, and Kyle wasn’t about to give the Corps a reason to take the ring away. It was all he had left. “He always says that when he wants somethin’ you ain’t willing to give,” Guy continued, and Kyle hissed at him to shut up. He hadn’t said it quietly enough, for Salaak paused and gave him a curious look.   
  
“Sorry, just tired.” He had a smile somewhere; with a few seconds searching, he dredged it up and offered it in apology. “You were saying?”  
  
“The number of new recruits has increased significantly in the wake of recent events,” Salaak said smoothly, “and the number of experienced Lanterns available to train them is not sufficient.”  
  
“No,” Kyle interrupted. “I’m not qualified to train rookies,” he added into Salaak’s surprised silence.  
  
“It is part of your duties –“  
  
“I won’t do it.” He couldn’t have said what prompted his adamant refusal, only that the thought of rookies going out with only his training between them and whatever they might face engendered a reaction very like panic. It was completely irrational, but he could not be trusted to properly prepare anyone else when he’d failed so miserably himself.   
  
“Your current posting does require flexibility,” Salaak said after a measured look. “Furthermore, it would be disruptive to the schedules of those around you to send you where you are needed.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“I have one further question.” Kyle had had the impression before that if Salaak had a tail, he’d be lashing it, but never so vividly.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Do you plan on reopening this establishment?” The glance around Guy’s bar left no doubt what Salaak thought of it, but it was also clear that he was trying to be polite.   
  
“What’s that look for? Kick him through the window.” Guy would have had his arms crossed for that statement. Kyle resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose; Guy probably wouldn’t really have suggested defenestration in response to a simple disparaging look from Salaak. It had happened often enough, after all.  
  
“Well?” Salaak asked, somewhat impatiently.  
  
“Yes,” Kyle said. “I’m just not sure when.” The thought of opening the bar for business again was only marginally less distressing than closing it forever; it had been Guy’s project for as long as Kyle had known him, and either option felt wrong. Dishonoring Guy by taking over his baby was a step up from dishonoring him by shutting it down, but it would take some time before he felt ready.  
  
“I see.” Salaak vanished without further conversation, and Kyle was free to sleep.  
  
Weeks later, Kyle still had not managed to open the bar for business; Salaak was getting impatient with the delay, since there was nothing in the bar itself that justified Kyle’s refusal to unlock the doors. He couldn’t use the dream as an excuse – the dream that he’d had every night, that he was starting to see in flashes during his waking moments. Salaak would have thought he was compromised and taken away the ring, and Soranik’s opinion of his mental state – derived from her continuing irritation with his string of injuries – notwithstanding, the ring was the only thing he had left.  
  
The dream started the same way it always did; it had started the day Kyle had decided to reopen the bar, the day he’d stopped hearing Guy’s voice. The courtyard shimmered in the dark, edges warped and twisted, and he could see its energy flowing towards the tower. Bright lines slid around the edges, coalescing at the gate and the stairs, ensuring that no one could pass through the openings. Now, he could see how impossible it was to escape on the ground, and only in hindsight could he see how tainted the structure really was.  
  
“You take the door, I’ll take the stairs.” The words were never quite the same, but Guy smiled brightly at him every time.  _No,_  Kyle wanted to say.  _We should stay together._  But the words never came, and even if they hadn’t separated, it wouldn’t have changed what had happened. The dream after that had different shapes – some nights, Guy simply vanished and Kyle searched until he woke, calling and calling and hearing only silence. Some nights, Kyle found himself stuck in the gatehouse, unable to move or make a sound, while Guy made a perfunctory search before flying away. On the worst nights, the sniper came as he had before, but Kyle could see the cruel smirk as the sniper fired again and again and again.  
  
“There’s nothing up there,” Guy said, voice wavering in and out. Kyle turned to see him fading, and then the gatehouse melted away.  
  
“This is new,” he tried to say, but the words stuck in the throat he no longer had.   
  
“Kyle!” It was Guy’s voice, urgent and more real than anything that had happened in weeks.  
  
“Guy!” he shouted back, but the dark dissolved into the guest room above the bar and Hal leaning over him.  
  
“Hal,” he said, looking worried, and Kyle couldn’t help it. The last few seconds suddenly struck him as utterly inane and he started laughing, which only made Hal’s frown deeper. “Are you all right?”  
  
The laughter drained away as quickly as it had come, and Kyle tilted his head to get a better angle. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I’ve been assigned as your new partner,” Hal said, a bit hesitantly. “And we have an assignment.”  
  
“Can I shower first?”  
  
“I…” Hal just blinked, and Kyle took the opportunity to slip past him towards the shower. He left the door open while the water ran.  
  
“What assignment?”  
  
“Uh.” Hal shuffled back and forth through the doorway, eventually settling on leaning against the doorframe with his back to the shower. “There’s a star in sector 629 that’s been destabilizing; the fourth planet was inhabited, but the evacuation is nearly complete.”  
  
“Okay.” Shower finished, Kyle shut off the water and stepped out, toweling the water out of his hair. “What are we doing out there?”  
  
“The star’s been more and more active – we’re supposed to make sure the last colony ships make it out of the system and keep any damage to a minimum, if we can.”  
  
Towel hung neatly on the rack, Kyle ringed on his uniform. Hal glanced at him as if to ask, “Are you ready to go?” and did a double take, words catching in his throat with a sort of strangled grunt.  
  
“What?”   
  
“Your uniform is, um, different,” Hal said after a full minute of working his mouth. Kyle had nearly forgotten that he’d ever worn anything else, and he fingered the vest.  
  
“Yes,” he said softly, and Hal closed his mouth.   
  
Sector 629 wasn’t more than a few hours away at top speed, but Kyle didn’t speak. When they had reached the star in question and Hal had found the last ship preparing to leave the system, he found himself grateful for the silence.   
  
“You take care of the ship,” Hal said. “I’ll keep an eye on the star.”   
  
The dream rocketed to the forefront of Kyle’s mind so strongly that he almost grabbed Hal to prevent him from leaving, but he managed to simply nod in reply.   
  
When he reached it, the ship proved to be massive – it held the last remnants of the planet’s population as well as many of their cultural artifacts, according to the panicked and somewhat irate transmission. He tuned it out and looped slowly around the trajectory – there was nothing obstructing the path yet, and the star appeared stable. He stuck to the back of the ship like a burr, watching the star for any signs of activity.   
  
“I’ll take the stairs if you’ll get the door,” Guy said, smiling disarmingly.  
  
“No,” Kyle whispered. “Not here.” He brought up a hand to rub his eyes and found himself turning to face Guy. “All right,” he heard himself say, and he could only watch as his hand reached out to open the door.   
  
Heat flared over his shoulder, and he turned to look. The tower was on fire, flames spreading across the wooden walls so quickly his eyes couldn’t track them. Before he could react, the ceiling crashed inwards, the force of the impact pushing him through the wall. When his eyes cleared, the trail of steam from the colony ship surrounded him and the buzzing in his ears resolved itself into Hal’s voice.  
  
“Kyle! Please respond! Are you all right?”  
  
“I…” The ship buckled and twisted under the pressure of its own atmosphere, its structural integrity compromised by the massive breach in the hull. It ripped itself apart as Kyle watched, unable to channel a coherent thought through the ring.   
  
“Kyle!” Green and black flashed in front of his eyes, and the last vestiges of the dream finally released him. Hal hovered just slightly above him, glaring. “What the hell was that?”  
  
“I…” The courtyard flashed in front of his eyes again, and Kyle shook his head to clear it. He had to destroy the planet if he wanted to keep his ring – that much was becoming clear. He could not be trusted to function with it invading not only his dreams but his waking life, and he would not give up the ring. “I have to go.”  
  
“Wait!” Hal reached for him, but it was ridiculously easy to evade his grasp, and Hal didn’t even try to hold him with a construct. Kyle sent a flare of power arcing towards the sun and it responded with a blinding flash. By the time the flash faded, Kyle was long gone, racing towards the restricted planet.  
  
The closer Kyle got to the courtyard, the stronger the images became, but he was focused enough to ignore them now. There would be no further distractions. The small planetoid was exactly as he remembered, the courtyard clearly visible on the surface as soon as the planetoid came into view. Its energy glowed a sickly yellowish orange, flickering through spots of almost leprous white, and Kyle paused. Simply destroying the planetoid wasn’t enough; the energy would linger. The bright star illuminating the planetoid caught his eye, and he smiled.  
  
A cascade reaction deep within the star’s core would cause the star to explode and consume the planet in the process, burning off its energy and cleansing its aura. “Ring, how can I catalyze a supernova?”  
  
Several minutes and an argument with the ring over whether or not protocol allowed for the deliberate destruction of a star later, Kyle stood on the surface of the planetoid, in the center of the courtyard. This time, the ring worked perfectly, and he formed a multi-pronged hook. It spun off towards the sun, faster than he could see, and he waited for it to reach the star’s corona. Just as it reached the edge of his vision, something blocked his construct.   
  
“NO!” He poured more power into it, trying to force it beyond the barrier that should not exist, until his construct snapped under the strain. The shock reverberated all the way back towards him, its vibrations increasing until the entire planetoid shook and he lost his balance. The ground beneath his feet vanished as he fell into utter blackness.   
  
“Move it!” The room above the gate had been empty, and yet a sniper had materialized and was taking potshots at the both of them. Guy hadn’t heard the first shot until he’d seen the hideous blossom of red on Kyle’s shoulder, and then instinct took over. The huge rock at the far end of the courtyard was their best chance at cover, with the rings not working properly, and he shoved Kyle towards it, trying not to move in a straight line. A second shot rang out, and a third, and then he lost count. Kyle froze in front of him, a maddening few inches from safety, and turned around. Guy started to physically push his partner forward, but Kyle’s eyes narrowed and he shoved Guy downwards.  
  
The sharp report echoed through the trees. Guy knew with absolute certainty what its trajectory was, and that he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Falling, he reached through the ring with every ounce of will he could summon and sent a blast of power arcing towards the gatehouse. The structure shattered into smoke and ash, a vaguely humanoid body tumbling limply downwards, but the bullet passed through his construct as if it were intangible. Guy hit the ground and twisted, coming up in something resembling a crouch. Kyle was still so close to the headstone, not that it mattered at this point.  
  
“Dammit, Kyle!” Guy scrambled to his partner, turning him over carefully. The bullet had passed through Kyle’s ribs and lodged somewhere inside; Guy could just barely reach it with the ring, but he couldn’t grip it to pull it out. “What the fucking hell were you  _thinking_?”  
  
“It’s okay,” Kyle whispered, reaching up with one visibly trembling hand. Incredibly, he was smiling. Guy took Kyle’s hand in his, squeezing it tightly, and redoubled his efforts to fix the damage. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”  
  
“Like hell,” Guy growled, but Kyle’s eyes were closed. “Don’t you dare give up. Don’t you dare.” The flow of blood slowed and finally stopped, and the twisted bit of metal finally slid out of the wound, far too late. Guy pressed it into Kyle’s limp hand, and laid that hand over Kyle’s chest. Someone had fallen from the gatehouse, and Guy was about to get some answers.  
  
The alien lay on the ground where it had fallen, humanoid in shape although its skin was an oddly cyanotic blue. Guy grabbed it and hauled it upright, searching for signs of life. “What the hell was that, you asshole?” It didn’t so much as twitch, and the ring confirmed that the alien was in fact stone cold dead. Guy shook it for good measure and threw the body through the gate with all his strength. It landed just inside the gate, and Guy stalked towards it with the intent of incinerating the body.  
  
“Guy!”  
  
The voice was as familiar as the ring, but he wasn’t in the mood to put up with Hal Jordan. “Fuck off, Jordan. I’m busy.”  
  
“What’s going on?” Hal landed lightly, with perfect grace, between Guy and the alien. “What happened?”  
  
“That thing happened.” Guy pointed at the alien, furiously. “And I’m gonna destroy it.”  
  
“Wha—is it dead?” Hal twisted around to look at the alien, confusion creeping over his expression. “Where’s Kyle?”  
  
“They’re  _both_  dead, and I’m gonna make sure this thing can’t come back.” Guy started toward the alien again, but Hal put out a hand to stop him.   
  
“It… It won’t help.” The sorrow in Hal’s face was somehow obscene; what right did Hal have to look at him that way? Hal hadn’t even really  _known_  Kyle, not like Guy. It had been Guy’s job to watch his partner’s back, and he had done a piss-poor job of it.  
  
“Yeah, whatever.” The alien was dead, anyway. Guy made an about-face and went back to the headstone. “Got any fancy way to get out of here?”  
  
“Uh, the usual,” Hal said. Guy could feel the other man watching him. Whatever had been affecting the rings before was gone now; creating a construct to carry Kyle home for the last time went exactly as it should have. The peaceful smile still on Kyle’s face was suddenly infuriating, and Guy solidified the construct into opacity so that he wouldn’t have to look at it.  
  
“You’ve got a –“ Hal started, reaching for his vest, and Guy touched his side. He’d been hit; a line of red, already darkened and clotting, met his fingers.  
  
“It’s fine,” he said, and lifted the construct into the air. The little planetoid was much closer to Oa than Guy had thought; it seemed like no more than a moment before they were navigating its atmosphere, and even less time before Hal was explaining to Salaak what had happened while Guy suffered through Soranik poking at his ribs with something pointy.   
  
“I would prefer Lantern Gardner to make his own report,” Salaak finally said, after Hal answered a sixth question with hesitating uncertainty. “That is a restricted area.”  
  
“I don’t know how we got there,” Guy said, pulling his shirt down.   
  
“With these toxins in your system, I’m not surprised,” Soranik muttered, holding a small vial of red liquid. He hadn’t even noticed her drawing blood; when had she done that? “You should be more careful of what you ingest.”  
  
“Yeah, you say that now.” For a brief second, Guy saw Kyle standing in front of the door – the other man seemed more substantial than anything else in the room. There was something odd about the image, but it wasn’t until Kyle had vanished as quickly as he’d appeared that Guy realized Kyle had been wearing an exact replica of his vest and boots. “What the fuck.”  
  
“Lantern Gardner,” Salaak said sharply. Clearly he hadn’t seen Kyle, or there would have been a very different reaction.  
  
“Look, I don’t know. We woke up, the rings didn’t work, and some idiot started shooting at us from a window. That’s it.” Guy eyed the door, but Kyle didn’t reappear.  
  
“What happened to your assailant?” Salaak was all but twitching impatiently now.  
  
“Deceased.” It must have been shock, Guy decided, much as he hated to admit it.  
  
“Where are its remains?” Salaak pressed, somehow managing to loom despite standing at least two feet shorter than everyone else in the room.  
  
“Still there? I don’t know.”  
  
“Guy, I didn’t see anyone else when I got there,” Hal interjected, flicking little worried looks between him and Salaak. “Just you and Kyle.”  
  
“What?” Guy couldn’t bring out any further words for a moment. “You were standing right in front of it! All gray-skinned and ugly. Three arms.”  
  
“There wasn’t anything there,” Hal repeated. “I scanned the area.”  
  
“That’s ridiculous. I ain’t lying.”  
  
“Could the toxins –“ Hal started, and then fell silent.  
  
“You think I was hungover enough to hallucinate some kind of creature killing my partner? Is that it? Screw that.” Guy pointed towards the other room. “He’s in there, and –“ A subtle alteration of the tension running through the room brought him to a halt as he realized exactly what Hal had – however accidentally – implied. “Like hell you just accused me of shooting _Kyle_.”  
  
Hal’s backpedaling might have been almost amusing under other circumstances, but Guy was in no mood to listen to the other man stammer out an excuse. He stalked out of the med center, slamming the door behind him. His bar was closed, a sign on the window claiming that it would reopen as soon as he damn well pleased, and he slammed that door as well. A semi-permanent construct shielded the windows and the door as soon as he could think of it.   
  
“Lantern Gardner.” Salaak’s voice came over the ring, accompanied by a little holographic image.  
  
“What,” Guy snapped, trying to keep his voice as level as possible.  
  
“The memorial service is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” Salaak said mildly.   
  
“And the investigation?” Guy asked.  
  
“Lantern Natu has determined the veracity of your statements. As the restricted area is well known for its anomalous occurrences, I see no reason to doubt your account of events.”  
  
“Right.” Guy paused, and Salaak took the opportunity to sign off. He checked the constructs again, ensuring their solidity, and turned out the lights. The sense of confinement in the dark was almost overwhelming, and he barely stopped himself from smashing out a window.   
  
“You bastard,” he muttered, removing the ring before he did something with it he’d regret. “You gave up. How could you just give up?” He smashed the nearest chair into a table, reducing it to splinters, and threw the pieces aside.   
  
"You bastard," he said again, and stalked up the stairs. There was nothing he could hit without breaking it, and if he started to demolish the bar, he wouldn't stop until it was no longer standing. He paced the hallway on the second floor, not wanting to see anyone else or be seen. The thought of the memorial service in the morning was like some kind of horrific joke - he kept waiting for the punchline, kept waiting for Kyle to show up at the door with a grin and no apology.   
  
"Fuck this, I ain't going. I ain't going for you. You gave up. You gave up and walked away, and I ain't gonna forgive you for that."   
  
He couldn't stand to stay upstairs, couldn't stand to sit around the bar. There was a sense of something vaguely wrong that he couldn’t pinpoint, like something itching just under his skin. The next round of pacing brought him to the stairs, and Guy took them down two at a time. Underneath the bar itself were far too many things he never wanted to see again (Kyle's sketchbook, an old coffee pot missing its handle, the second set of keys that Kyle had forgotten again), and a dusty bottle of something green. He had no idea what was in it.  
  
"Ring, is this poisonous to humans?" he asked, and got a reply in the negative. It smelled like motor oil and tasted worse, and by the time he should have been speaking at the memorial service the bottle was half empty and Hal was pounding on his door. Guy told him to fuck off in the rudest terms possible and checked the constructs again – they were still there and glowing a happy green. The next clear memory he had was of the underside of the bar and several smashed tables, accompanied by a raging headache and the indefinable phantom itch under his skin that would not go away.  
  
“Are you still hungover?” Hal’s voice demanded far too loudly, and he swore at the ring to reduce the volume of the transmission.  
  
“No,” he answered, just to be contrary. “I’m cleaning.” The statement would be true at some point in the near future; it didn’t strictly count as prevarication. “And why do you care?” Everything ruined could be burned; he leveraged himself off the floor, ringed earplugs, and started dragging it all together.  
  
“Because we have – what are you doing in there? Open the door.”  
  
“I don’t want to open the door,” Guy said, still in no mood to be cooperative. There was no reason the bar should look off, and yet it did. “Busy,” he added. There had been too many tables in the bar anyway; it all made a nice heap in the center of the much emptier room along with the junk from under the bar itself.   
  
“Guy!” Hal sounded frustrated, and the mental image of the expression he must have had made Guy smile.  
  
“Hold yer horses,” he said, and let the door open. Hal walked in just as Guy lit the trash pile on fire and stopped dead. Guy automatically glanced over to see what Hal was looking at, and saw Kyle inside the bubble. He was almost startled enough to let go of the bubble, but Kyle was wearing the vest and boots again, and Guy was fairly sure he wasn’t real. “Fucking hell.” Sure enough, Kyle vanished as soon as the flames touched him.  
  
“What are you –“  
  
“I told you I was cleaning.” Clever manipulation of the air flow through the construct could accelerate the burning process and keep the flames burning hotter than they normally would, and Guy wanted this over as quickly as possible. It was a pain in the ass.  
  
“Usually cleaning doesn’t… involve… How long is this going to take?”  
  
“Why?” Pushing Hal’s buttons was far too easy, and he had to convince himself that it was probably not a good idea. “You got somewhere to be?”  
  
“Um.” Hal was looking between him and the contained fireball, obviously trying to figure out what to say. “We have somewhere to be.”  
  
“We?” There was nothing but ash left in the bubble now, and Guy took it out back for disposal. Hal shadowed him, a cautious few steps away.  
  
“It’s just temporary,” he said, and Guy realized what he should have understood several minutes ago.  
  
“You’re my new partner.” Buttons indeed – Salaak was pushing his, but he wouldn’t be manipulated. “Fine. Where are we going?”  
  
The expression on Hal’s face was priceless – he was trying to act perfectly smooth, but surprise and suspicion that Guy wasn’t arguing kept creeping out. Guy let out a short bark of laughter. “I’ll be right out. Tell me on the way.”  
  
That only deepened the suspicion, but Hal stepped outside. Guy joined him a few moments later, feeling marginally better than he had been. “Damn green shit,” he muttered, apparently too quietly for Hal to hear, for the other man didn’t react.  
  
The assignment was easy enough; beat some heads in that needed beating and find the missing ring of the sector’s former Lantern. The only odd moment came as they were leaving the planet in question, and Guy looked down to see the courtyard. The itch under his skin intensified, and he nearly dove back downwards, but when he looked again it was gone.  
  
“Did you see something?” Hal asked, and Guy shook his head.  
  
“Trick of the light,” he said, and Hal seemed to accept it.  
  
The second time he saw the courtyard was after his third assignment with Hal; he rounded a corner on Oa and nearly walked through the gate. After that, the courtyard showed up with disturbing frequency – sometimes he would catch glimpses of it out of the corner of his eye from above some innocent planet, and sometimes he would see it from the ground. Every time he saw it, the sense of dissonance increased, but he couldn’t figure out what wasn’t right.  
  
“Fuck off,” he said to it on the day it decided to impersonate his bar. “You’re a stress reaction. Just fuck  _off_.”  
  
“Talkin’ to someone?” came Kilowog’s voice from behind him.  
  
“No,” he said. “What’s up?” He wasn’t about to go into his bar while it was doing an impression of the alien tower where his lover had been killed.  
  
“I got a batch of rookies,” Kilowog started.  
  
“You always have a batch of rookies,” Guy pointed out. “That’s your job.”  
  
“Yeah, well, I got a bunch of brand spanking new poozers who can’t sort their elbows from their asshats, and another group as just need some fine tuning. You busy?”  
  
The bar stubbornly refused to go back to the way it was supposed to look, and everything else was starting to look oddly flat around it. Guy rubbed his eyes. “Which one you want me to take?”  
  
“Fine tuning,” Kilowog said, and grinned.  
  
Guy’s rookies were waiting in one of several training grounds, and some of them had the audacity to look relieved when Kilowog told them they’d be working with Honor Lantern Gardner. He smirked at them, and the relief faded.  
  
“All right, listen up,” he said once Kilowog had gone. “You think you know what you’re doing? You have no idea. There are things out there that will chew you up and spit out the pieces, but by god, by the time I’m finished with you, you might give them a hard time going down.”  
  
“That’s what you said last time,” came a very familiar voice, and Guy crossed his arms over the twinge in his chest. Kyle was not standing in the bunch of rookies, no matter what two of his five senses were telling him.   
  
“Split into pairs. You work against each other. The last pair standing passes.” It wasn’t strictly true – there wasn’t much that would get a rookie punted from the training program at this late stage – but they didn’t know that. “Points deducted for permanent damage caused to opposing teams,” Guy added.  
  
The rookies stared at him in several approximations of bewilderment, even after he erected a hugely complex construct. “What are we—“ one of them started.  
  
“Inside. Now.” He left a blinking door open until they’d filed inside in pairs, then sealed it off. “Last pair standing!”  
  
“Would you have fallen for that?” Kyle was leaning over his shoulder, looking all kinds of ridiculous in Guy’s vest. “I wouldn’t have.”  
  
“You were never trained properly to begin with,” Guy shot back.   
  
“Oh, sure, like that was my fault.”  
  
“You had John, me, and Alan,” Guy told him. “No excuses.”  
  
“Picky, picky, picky,” Kyle scoffed back. “Your rookies are cooperating down there.”  
  
“Rat bastards,” Guy muttered, and ringed a bullhorn to carry his voice through the entire construct. “There’s a two hour time limit! If more than one pair is left, you all fail!”  
  
“Battle Royale method?” Kyle asked cheerfully, again looking more solid than everything else; the rookies below and the training ground had the feeling of a two dimensional photograph, as if there was no depth to anything, and he didn’t think it was a problem with his vision.  
  
“Okay, that’s it. You ain’t real.” The figment of his imagination had the temerity to look wounded. “You’re in  _my_  head. You don’t get to reference shit I don’t know.” This had to stop – whatever was causing these random hallucinations had started on the restricted planet, and that was where his answer would be. Given the odd flatness to everything around him, he didn’t consider requesting assistance.  
  
“Ring, information on restricted area –“ he paused. He wasn’t sure where, exactly, the restricted area had been, and rephrased to ask where he’d been.  
  
“No information,” the ring returned.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a restricted area.”  
  
“No travel in a restricted area has been logged.”  
  
“Where was Honor Lantern Rayner killed?”  
  
“Error.”  
  
“Don’t you error me, you piece of junk. Give me a map of everywhere I’ve gone for the past week.” The ring obligingly put up a three dimensional map of Oa, with several threads leading off planet and back. “Past two weeks. Three.” The threads intensified into a dense scribble, until he finally located the one he wanted. “Delete everything except this one.”  
  
If he was right, the rookies currently doing their level best to incapacitate each other without doing any actual damage didn’t exist and it wouldn’t matter if he left them where they were. If he was wrong, then he’d been compromised to such a degree that he shouldn’t be wearing the ring at all, much less training rookies. He left them there without a backwards glance, finding the trajectory outlined by the ring and following it back.  
  
The ring’s memory fuzzed out several times, but Guy was able to extrapolate the path he’d taken and pick it up again each time. When the map vanished for the last time, the little planetoid with its courtyard was barely visible, and Guy resisted the urge to point to it with a demand that the ring tell him what it thought he was seeing.  
  
Cold seeped through his vest as he landed in the empty courtyard. The tower and the gatehouse were intact, as if he’d never been there, and there was no sign of the alien on the ground. “Well?” he asked, although he couldn’t have said whether he was asking his ring for an explanation or the courtyard for closure. The ring chirped once and fell silent.  
  
“Well?” Guy asked again, and the courtyard fell into nothing.  
  
He woke to the white ceiling of the med center, with no sense of intervening time, and more confused than he was willing to admit. “What the fuck,” he said quietly. Working on the assumption that someone around had to know more than he did, he made for the door.  
  
“Lantern Gardner,” said a quiet voice. It took Guy a moment to place it.  
  
“Saarek?” The other Lantern had been standing in the shadows. Guy didn’t know him particularly well, only that he allegedly spoke to ghosts.  
  
“I am glad to see you are feeling better,” Saarek said politely. “Have you healed sufficiently?”  
  
“Healed?” Guy asked. He wasn’t sure where, exactly, he’d been before the med center, or what had happened that he might need healing.  
  
“There was a nasty gash along your ribs,” Saarek explained.  
  
“That’s weeks – what day is it?”  
  
“You and Lantern Rayner have facilitated the removal of a rather tricky spirit leech,” Saarek said, clearly avoiding the question. “The planet was restricted due to its presence, as my duties had not permitted me the time to purge it.”  
  
“Spirit leech?”  
  
“It was at its most vulnerable when preparing to devour a soul,” Saarek said, and Guy gave up trying to get any straight answers.   
  
“Thank you, Saarek,” he said, and edged towards the door.  
  
Saarek actually chuckled. “The leech creates hallucinations,” he said. “It cannot absorb a soul from a living body, nor one that has died of external causes. Had either you or Lantern Rayner performed any action within the hallucination that had led to your deaths, however, you would have been ingested.”  
  
“It would’ve eaten us,” Guy said. He would have thought that by now he would have run into pretty much every way to die, and yet he seemed to keep finding new ones.  
  
“Correct.” Saarek inclined his head slightly.  
  
“And you’re the reason it didn’t.”   
  
“Among others.” Guy knew modesty when he saw it; any assistance had been incidental.  
  
“There was a rescue mission, wasn’t there.” That was humiliating; he and Kyle were supposed to do the saving, not need to be saved. He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Wait.”  
  
Saarek had vanished while Guy wasn’t looking, which was a very Batman-like trick and completely unfair when Guy still had questions. He stalked out the door and nearly ran over Soranik Natu.  
  
“Oh, you’re awake,” she said, looking less than pleased.  
  
“You got a problem with that?” Unless she was going to give him answers, he saw no need to be polite.  
  
“Not at all.” Soranik looked at him for a moment before producing a very practiced smile. “Your timing is rather fortuitous.”  
  
“Saarek wouldn’t tell me what day it was.” He could have just asked the ring, he supposed, but he hadn’t thought of it.  
  
“Worried about how late you are?” Soranik’s smile was gone. The woman had an incredible smirk; pity she didn’t use it more often.  
  
“Yes,” he said, just to see how she’d answer. “Where’d Hal go?”  
  
“Hal Jordan? He hasn’t been here. You were due back at nine this morning. You’re only thirteen, fourteen hours late, by the way.” She pushed him back inside the room, poking at him with various constructs. He couldn’t tell what any of them were, and it occurred to him to wonder if she was possibly playing pranks on all of them with her massively complicated equipment. Maybe some of it didn’t actually have a purpose.  
  
“Lucky me,” he said.  
  
“You  _are_  lucky.” The constructs vanished. “Lantern Rayner will be several days late.”  
  
The bottom dropped out of Guy’s stomach. If none of what had happened after they’d reached the courtyard had been real, then – “Kyle’s not dead?”  
  
“Is that what you saw?”  
  
“Natu…” He couldn’t articulate anything else past the morass of emotion pressing into his throat; anger, relief, and hope all jammed together.  
  
“You were both hit with some kind of crude projectile weapon; in your case, the damage was fairly light. In his, there was a rather deep hole that leaked a considerable amount of vital fluid before Kilowog and Saarek got to the two of you.” She opened the door, a clear invitation to leave.  
  
“But he’s all right?” Relief won out, and he could speak.  
  
“He’ll be fine.” She led him down the hallway. “See?”  
  
Guy peered through the door to see a sleeping Kyle, pale but neither dead nor a ghost wearing Guy’s uniform. Granted, it was difficult to tell whether he was wearing anything at all under the blanket, but odds were that it wasn’t a green vest.   
  
“You’re free to go,” Natu said from behind him. “Or stay. Salaak wants to see you in the morning.”  
  
Guy nodded, and she was halfway down the hallway when he turned around. He slipped quietly through the door, leaving it ajar, and ruffled Kyle’s hair. “Still got a few things to learn about interstellar barhopping, kid,” he said softly, and grinned.   


_Epilogue:_

“Why can’t I leave now?”

Kyle was audible from down the hall; Guy stopped walking to chuckle.  He’d been making his report to Salaak, which had boiled down to something like possibly accidental poisoning had led to a lapse in judgment and they’d been overwhelmed by the ghost-like predator while their defenses were down.  It had not been a particularly pleasant session, but Guy had gotten the impression Salaak was laughing at them more than he was angry, so whatever.

“I don’t see why I have to stay.”

The reply to Kyle’s increasingly irritated complaints was too muffled for Guy to make out, although he was fairly sure the voice belonged to Soranik Natu.  He started down the hallway again, poking his head through the door without knocking.  “You sound better,” he said.

“Thank you,” Kyle told him. He had ringed his uniform on and was apparently trying to physically escape.  Soranik was standing between him and the door.

“You take him again,” Soranik said, pointing unerringly at Guy despite her gaze staying fixed on Kyle.  “We don’t _have_ human blood cells, and the rings can’t create them.  He’ll regenerate naturally, but it will take time.  Make sure he gets fluids and keep him quiet.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is becoming a habit with the two of you.”  Soranik finally looked at Guy, favoring him with a glare. 

“Twice is not a trend,” Kyle muttered.  “Thanks, Soranik.”

“Thank me by not ending up back here through sheer idiocy.”  She stepped aside and gestured towards the door.

Guy had not been given an assignment; his plans for the day involved seeing exactly what kind of mess his bar was in after a week’s absence, and neither of them could get into trouble there.  Kyle voiced no objections, and Guy spent the next several hours going over inventory and cleaning.  Keeping the bar bright and shiny was something he actually enjoyed, although he wouldn’t admit it in so many words.  It was relaxing, restoring order to something that didn’t fight back and stayed the way it was put.  He was working his way through the polishing the tables when he noticed that Kyle was mostly asleep over what was theoretically paperwork and turned out to actually be a doodle of Guy wiping down the bar.

“Hey.”

"I’m awake.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t.”  Guy proffered a glass of juice, replacing the long empty water glass, and Kyle drained it. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs.”  Kyle’s obstinate expression faded, and he let Guy pull him to the second floor.  “Give me a hand with these?”

The guest room had accumulated some assorted random objects since Kyle’s last stay there – while his ribs had been knitting back together after their encounter with a supposedly extinct dragon-like creature – but it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to clean them back out.

“Oh,” Kyle said.  “I can take care of this.”

“Yeah, I know.”  Guy started moving things out of the room anyway, and it wasn’t long before the room was livable again.  The last of it went downstairs, and when Guy returned, Kyle was sitting on the bed.  He leapt to his feet at the sound of the door opening, looking around wildly.  “It’s just me.”

“You were _dead_ ,” Kyle said, shaking.  “It was my fault.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t dead now.”  Guy put an arm around Kyle’s shoulders, and Kyle clung to him, trembling in a delayed reaction to stress and exhaustion.  Somehow they ended up seated on the bed, and Guy found himself holding Kyle just as tightly.  “If what you saw was like what I saw, then it wasn’t your fault, okay?”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t.”  It wasn’t a promise either of them could really make, not in their line of work, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to keep it.  Kyle calmed down at those words, relaxing against Guy and breathing slowing into smooth regularity.  “Kyle?”

“Mm.” 

Not making Kyle let go was far simpler than trying to wriggle away without waking him; Guy pulled him all the way onto the bed and curled around him.  Kyle’s happy little sigh was more than enough reason to stay right where he was. 


	8. No Such Thing As Bad Weather

“Worst timing I’ve ever seen,” Guy did not say.  No, Guy Gardner was too busy trying to deflect the sudden onslaught of yellow constructs to spare any attention for distractions such as speaking, or possibly breathing. A sharp blow to the ribs had knocked the air out of his lungs in any case; as far as he was concerned, the lack of air was just one more variable.  It was easier than trying to suck air through the sheeting rain, anyway.  If Kyle hadn’t _sneezed_ right as they were trying to sneak up on a group of Sinestros, Guy would have been able to put together a slightly more tactically sound operation.  As it was, their entire fledgling plan had been reduced to ‘stay alive.’

A tiny corner of his mind noted the highly detailed but not particularly effective green constructs that had not originated from his ring; Kyle was fighting, then, and Guy felt justified in his annoyance that his partner wasn’t doing any better than he was.  He finally managed to draw in a long ragged breath, and was rewarded for his lack of concentration with a blow to the head.

“You bastard,” he growled, or thought he did.  The rain seemed to have gotten worse, and trying to shake the water out of his eyes didn’t help at all. 

“Guy!” he heard, and then he couldn’t move.  Something very large was pinning his wrists together behind his back – whether it was a construct or actually alive, he couldn’t tell.  The something groped at his fingers, and Guy curled his hands protectively into fists.  The Sinestros probably wouldn’t balk at actually slicing his fingers off to get at his ring, but that didn’t mean he had to make it any easier on them.

“Power level, 1.3%,” the ring said, in a tone of voice that was supposed to be helpful.  It didn’t have particularly good timing either.

“Shaddup,” Guy told it, as a sharp edge started slicing into his finger.  His best shot was probably one mostly uncontrolled burst of power to shake off whatever was holding him and then a temporary strategic withdrawal.    He was a hairsbreadth from releasing the blast when a whirling blade sailed straight towards him, close enough that he could feel it brush against his hair.  A splash of hot liquid from behind him told him that the something holding his wrists had been alive and was now either dead or incapacitated; either way, it had let go of his wrists.  Guy pulled out of what remained of its grip and took off in Kyle’s direction.

A brilliant flare of light coupled with a crashing sound took less power than an actual explosion and was almost as good of a distraction; Guy shielded his eyes against the light and the brief but dazzling array of rainbows thrown into sharp relief against the pouring rain and spotted the other Lantern falling.

“This is getting to be a habit,” he muttered, but between the rain and the aftereffects of his flash grenade, he managed to grab Kyle before he hit the ground and escape to what was probably out of sight before his ring lost power completely.  “Fine time you pick to be useless,” he said to it under his breath.  “Locate shelter,” he added, slightly louder, glancing around.  The Sinestros had been grouped in a valley, in the midst of a possible alien equivalent of an Earth rainforest, but Guy hadn’t checked the local topography before retreating, and he didn’t have time for a detailed study now.

A map directing him mostly up the side of the mountain on which Guy now found himself popped up for approximately two and a half seconds before the ring informed him that it had zero power left and shut down.  He looked up towards the overcast sky, but he couldn’t see anything through the dense vegetation. There could be fifty Sinestros surrounding them and he would have no idea.  Kyle was completely limp and no help whatsoever, and Guy debated borrowing his ring before he remembered that it only worked for Kyle.  Again, no help whatsoever.  He tugged his partner into a fireman’s carry and started in the direction that he thought would probably get them to whatever shelter the ring had shown him before shutting down.

Some time later – it could have been twelve minutes or twelve hours for all Guy knew – he had no idea where he was in relation to where he had started out and Kyle hadn’t so much as twitched.  The vegetation had been steadily, if slowly, changing with the altitude, although the rain hadn’t let up at all.  The broad leafy plants were giving way to massive conifers whose branches nearly touched the ground on the outside, and the rain was getting colder.  He could see the edges of his breath through the chilly drops.

“Damn trees,” Guy said, although it wasn’t precisely _aloud_ ; Kyle was heavier than he looked and he didn’t have the breath to spare for speech that no one was going to hear anyway.  Choosing a tree at random and trying not to leave too many outward signs, he maneuvered underneath the branches.  It was surprisingly dry inside, although not much warmer than being in the rain.  Guy made a quick check for indigenous wildlife, but there didn’t seem to be anything living in the tree.  Kyle was still unresponsive when Guy set him down, but he was breathing and his costume was still firmly in place; since it was ring-generated, Guy figured he was probably more or less okay. 

It was significantly darker than it had been a few moments ago, which meant planetary nightfall, which in turn meant it was going to get colder.  Guy considered actively tapping into his ring’s power reserve, but if the Sinestros were tracking the ring’s energy, there was no better way to light a beacon for them.  Discretion very occasionally being the better part of valor, now was not the right time or place for a rematch.  The ring would probably keep him from freezing to death in any case (did that count as mortal harm? It damn well should, Guy thought), but then there was Kyle.  In theory, his ring didn’t run out of power, but it also wouldn’t protect him from mortal danger.

“Dammit.”  He could definitely see his breath in what little light remained, and couldn’t feel the cold.  While that counted as a plus, Kyle was visibly shivering.  “I knew it. I _knew_ it.  Kid, you’re a pain in the ass.”  Guy stripped off his vest and lowered himself to the ground, pulling Kyle against him with the vest on top.  That seemed to mostly do the trick, although he felt more than a little ridiculous wrapped around his partner like a kid with an oversized teddy bear.

After a while spent making and discarding various plans and watching the light vanish entirely, Guy shifted Kyle around again in yet another vain attempt to restore blood to various parts of his anatomy and found something odd. A hard little knob was lodged in Kyle’s side, just below one of his ribs.  Exploring it with his fingers didn’t tell him much more than that it wasn’t particularly large.  Reasoning that if it were big enough to do major damage, Kyle would have stopped breathing a while ago, Guy pulled it out.  It sparked bright yellow and an almost electric jolt zapped his fingers.  Without thinking, Guy tapped the reserve just long enough to crush the dart.  His concentration on it meant that when Kyle belted him across the side of the head, it took him completely by surprise.  He had just enough presence of mind to not let go of him.

“Stop that, you idiot, it’s me,” he hissed.

“Guy?” Kyle stopped his boneheaded determination to squish any bit of Guy within reach.  “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Guy returned, keeping his voice low.  “Who else would it be?”

“I can’t see,” Kyle said, lowering his voice to match Guy’s.

“Yeah, well, it’s dark.”  Guy could have made any number of comments on that score, but Kyle hadn’t had his sight back for very long, so he got a free pass this time.  “Most people can’t see when it’s dark.”  He could actually feel the relief spread through the other man.  It was weird.

“Where are we?”

“Under a tree.”  Guy felt along the side of his head; it looked like Kyle hadn’t hit him as hard as he’d thought, but it wasn’t particularly easy to be happy about one less potential bruise.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious. It’s a big tree – don’t use that!” Kyle had sparked his ring, but he shut it down at Guy’s whispered exclamation.

“Why not?”

“Unless you’re plannin’ on flying us both outta here, the last thing we need is the Sinestros picking up on your ring in the dark.  Mine’s outta juice,” he added. 

“You have another plan?”

“Soon as it gets light, we send a call for backup.  By the time they get here, we should have the Sinestros ready for transport.”  Pride should keep the Sinestros where they’d been found the first time, and Guy didn’t think it would take that long to find the place again.

“I thought you said you were out of power.”

“Yeah, so?”  Kyle started shaking, and it took Guy a moment to figure out that the other man was laughing.  Silently, it was true, but he was definitely laughing.  “What?”

“Any plan to subdue them?” Kyle asked, laughter still threading his voice.

“Yeah. Hit ‘em until they stop moving.  Get the big ones first.”

“I can do that.”  Kyle squirmed around, finally settling pressed up against Guy’s side with the vest draped across his chest.

“That’s mine, you know,” Guy felt compelled to point out. 

“I’m sharing,” Kyle told him.  “It’s cold in here.”

“I’m a heat vampire,” Guy said.  “You’ll freeze to death if you stay there.”  Kyle pulled away.  For a moment Guy thought he’d managed to offend him somehow, but a hand landed hesitantly on his shoulder and worked its way up to Guy’s cheek, followed by the other hand.  Guy wondered exactly what Kyle thought he was doing for precisely the time it took for Kyle to lean in and kiss him unerringly on the mouth.

“Mmf.”  Guy pulled back, reaching up and grasping Kyle’s wrists.  “Kyle, now is not the time.”

“You’re wet. I’m wet. And it’s cold.” Kyle shook his head, sending water droplets flying everywhere as if to say _See?_.

“Because it’s raining,” Guy pointed out.  “Get back here before you freeze.”

Kyle scooted back willingly enough, although he didn’t return the vest. “It was my fault,” he said after a moment, voice subdued.  “I’m sorry.”

Guy could hardly argue with the sentiment; if Kyle hadn’t gotten himself poisoned, the fight could have had a very different ending.  “How’d they get close enough to stick you, anyway?” he asked neutrally.  No use rubbing the kid’s nose in it, after all.

Kyle shrugged against him.  “One minute I was fighting, the next minute I was here.”

“Whole lotta one minutes between then and now,” Guy muttered.  “There’s a bit of a hike tomorrow.”

Kyle was silent for a moment and Guy wondered if he’d fallen asleep or possibly passed out again, but then he spoke.  “You might be able to charge your ring off mine.”

Of all the thousands of rings that the Corps created and used, Kyle’s had been unique; it hadn’t needed to be charged, but it also didn’t protect him against mortal harm and it couldn’t replicate.  Apparently the Guardians had kept it when he’d become Ion and simply returned it instead of giving him the standard issue.  “Huh.  Worth a shot.”

“Here.”  Kyle pulled away until he was sitting cross-legged across from Guy, taking the vest with him.  “Um. I’m not sure how to do this.”

“Just try not focusing the energy.”  Guy touched his ring lightly to Kyle’s.  It glowed, not as brightly as it normally did during charging, but enough that he thought it might be working.  He’d just opened his mouth to tell Kyle when a wild bolt of energy lashed outward, narrowly missing both Guy and the tree trunk behind him and leaving a hole in the branches opposite.  Guy yanked his ring back, checking it for damage.  “What the hell was that?” he demanded once he was satisfied that it was in one piece.

“I… I don’t know.”  Kyle sounded shaken, far more shaken than Guy felt.  His ring glowed faintly, an indistinct shape beginning to coalesce.  This time, Guy could feel the construct destabilize in warning of an explosion; Kyle saw it too – the construct careened outwards, dimming and then flaring into detonation.   Fragrant needles showered down on both of them, and Kyle flinched slightly.  “That can’t be good,” he said, trying for levity and not quite succeeding.

“Probably the poison,” Guy said.  It was the first thing that popped into his head, but it made sense.  “Be gone by morning.”  Even if that wasn’t entirely true, Kyle believing it should have the ring manifesting it as reality, and Guy had had a lot of practice projecting false confidence into his voice.  Granted, most of it had been pre-Lantern.  Either way, Guy wanted sleep before tangling with the Sinestros again.

“I guess you’re right,” Kyle said, but he was eyeing the ring warily, as if it might bite him.

“No shit,” Guy retorted.  Kyle was still eyeing the ring, though, so Guy went with the first distraction that he could think of. Kyle all but yelped in surprised, but he regained his balance quickly enough.  Almost before Guy could blink, Kyle was straddling his lap, mouth hot and demanding.  He nearly pulled back, but the sensation of Kyle’s nails raking down his back changed his mind.  Sleep could come later.

The following morning saw the Sinestro camp gone.  Guy cursed and kicked at the ground, and Kyle swept the planet for any evidence of their presence, but he turned up nothing. 

“Maybe we got lucky,” Kyle offered.  There were odd traces that he couldn’t identify, swathes of bare earth that looked almost like burnt patches.  They couldn’t be, though, because the rain hadn’t stopped falling.  Something else must have melted through the vegetation and scarred the soil.

“We don’t get luck,” Guy returned, glaring at the remains of some splintered trees.  The bare trunks were pocked and splashed with char.  “We had a job to do and we didn’t do it.”

“They’ll be back,” Kyle said, and there was an odd mix of eagerness and resignation in his voice. 

Guy chuckled.  “I suppose they will,” he said.  Neither of them saw the remains half-buried in the mud, the very flesh melted from the bones and the bones themselves slowly dissolving in the rain.


	9. With Friends Like These

“You’re _what_?” Hal Jordan said.  If he’d been holding the mug of – was that tea? – he would have dropped it.  Kyle could see his fingers twitching.

“It’s not like I just told you the world was ending,” he replied, calmly taking a sip of coffee.  Calmly.

“But… but…” Hal spluttered.  “Guy Gardner? You’re…” Kyle watched him choose a word.  “Sleeping with _Guy Gardner_? Our Guy Gardner?”

  
“Technically, my Guy Gardner,” Kyle said a little viciously, just to see if Hal would turn interesting colors.  Hal obliged.

“But…”

“Look, it’s not that big a deal.” Kyle set the coffee cup aside and stretched his hands in front of him.  “I’m –“ he used Hal’s choice of words “-sleeping with Guy.  End of story.”

“It _is_ a big deal!”  Hal had that over-protective father look, and Kyle silently wished for patience on behalf of any future children Hal might have.  They were certainly going to need it.  He was at the end of his very short store of patience with one senior Green Lantern.

“What is? That I let Guy Gardner fuck me or that I let men fuck me at all? Which is it, Hal?”

“Both! Neither! Why didn’t you tell me?” Hal was pacing now, shoulders rigid and mouth in a tight closed line.

“I just did!” Kyle retorted.  Hal hadn’t exactly been the first one to know about the relationship, but Kyle had come all the way to Earth because he thought Hal should know.  Hal was – sort of – his mentor and role model, and Guy’s too.  In a way.

“Not that!” Hal said so quickly that Kyle didn’t think he was listening at all.  “I mean, Guy, but –“

“So, what, then, that I’m bisexual?”  The end of Patience Trolley was heading straight into Rage Lane, brakes gone and steering locked.  “Where in our _long_ -“ Kyle invested the word with as much sarcasm as he could, considering that for most of their association, Hal had been possessed by a fear demon and trying to kill him “- history did you expect me to say that? ‘Hi, I’m Kyle, your replacement.  By the way, I fuck men and women both. Please stop trying to kill me, Parallax.’  Is that what you wanted out of me?”

Hal turned white.  “Don’t ever say throw that in my face again,” he said.  His hands had clenched into fists, and he looked more like Parallax in that moment than he had since actually being possessed. 

“This was a mistake,” Kyle said tightly, and started for the door.  He’d forgotten one of the fundamental rules of combat, which was to never take your eyes off your opponent.  Hal had him by the shoulder before he could blink.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” Hal said.  Kyle turned around and hit him in the jaw with all the strength he could muster.  To his vague surprise, Hal went sprawling.

Kyle hesitated for a bare moment and then tried to do the Right Thing.  He went back.  “Oh, man, Hal, I’m –“  Hal kicked his legs out from underneath him and Kyle went down.  The floor knocked the wind out of him, but he managed to roll out of reach for the time it took to get his breath back and scramble to his feet. Hal was standing, staring at him contemptuously.  “You’re asking for it,” Kyle said, and tackled him.

None of the skill Kyle had worked to acquire since he’d been given his ring went into this brawl, with his ring or his fists. He just tried to hit Hal where it hurt, put him down on the ground and keep him there.  He had no clear memories of the fight afterwards, just heated impressions of pain and jarring shocks to his wrists and hardened flesh both giving way and resisting his furious onslaught.  Finally a flying elbow to his temple dazed him long for Hal to throw him into a wall hard enough to crack it.

Kyle slid down the wall, vision graying out and ears ringing.  Shaking his head didn’t really help, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying again, and finally he used the wall as a prop to stand.  Hal was holding out a hand, as if he thought Kyle was going to let him touch him again.  Kyle shook his head a third time and made his way across the room to the balcony doors.

“Where are you going?” Hal might have said.  Kyle couldn’t quite hear over the ringing, and he certainly had no intention of answering. He opened the door and jumped off the balcony, not bothering to ring his uniform on.  It was dark, anyway, and no one was going to see him.

Somewhere between Utah and Missouri, the ringing and the underwater vision faded, and Kyle wished he had a warmer jacket.  He hadn’t thought about where he was going, either, but when he eventually found himself in New York, it wasn’t too much of a surprise.  Then again, he remembered, he didn’t have a place in New York any more.  He sighed and landed as out of sight as he could manage, with the vague idea that he’d find a cheap motel room or something and head back home in the morning.  Kyle, however, had always been ruled more by his impulses than his brain unless he was making a conscious effort otherwise, which is how he found himself on a rooftop with a bottle of tequila not much later, staring at the unexpectedly bright stars.  It was warmer on the ground than in the air, but he was still glad of the constructed jacket.  And the tequila.  Hal was less enraging through an alcoholic haze.

“Yeah, happy birthday, Kyle,” he muttered.  Not only did Hal’s reaction suck, but it pretty much confirmed this as the worst birthday ever.  He made a mental note to not announce any news on a birthday ever again and promptly forgot it.  He was debating the merits of singing himself a birthday song or figuring out if he could get off the roof when footsteps and a familiar voice intruded.

“Green L—Kyle?”

“Huh?” His vision wasn’t cooperating, but Kyle was fairly sure that face was in Bat-mode.  “You’re not Batman.”

Of all the things Nightwing had considered he might find on any rooftop during tonight’s patrol, much less this particular one, an extraordinarily inebriated Green Lantern wouldn’t have made even his least-likely list.  He’d even thought it might be a quiet night, according to his keen skills of deduction based on his excellent observations.  “What are you doing up here?” he asked, although he didn’t really expect an answer.  At least, he didn’t expect a coherent answer.

“Stargazing,” came back the quick and automatic answer, complete with an overlay of _what else would I be doing up here?_.

“Maybe you should come down.”  God forbid Kyle try and fly down from the roof, or climb.  The bottle he was clutching like a favorite toy was more than half-empty and as far as Nightwing could tell, the entirety of its missing contents had found their way into Kyle.

“Uh-uh. I like it up here.”  Kyle shuffled oddly, and Nightwing realized he was trying to turn around without actually moving away from the wall.

“Why don’t you let me have that,” he said, as more of the tequila migrated inside Kyle.

“Mine,” Kyle said. “Get your own.”

Nightwing sighed.  He really didn’t need this; he and Kyle had never been close, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Also, he had no idea where to leave him, and he damn well wasn’t taking the kid home with him, and why had he just mentally labeled Kyle a kid? Nightwing himself was the younger of them both. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“Fuck Hal Jordan,” Kyle said, and went back to the tequila.

There were some things Nightwing really did not want to know, ever, and this was one of them.  He reached for the other man, slowly, intending to pull him to his feet and get him off the roof somehow.  “Come on, Kyle, let’s get you down from here.”

“Get off me!” He was on his feet in a flash, uniform in place and ring sparking.  The uniform was blurring badly, shifting between what Nightwing could only assume was his present design and the old black and white he’d adopted when he’d first gotten the ring.  “Get away!” Kyle shouted, and dove off the side of the roof.

Cursing, Nightwing followed, sure that he was going to get himself killed in a drunken escapade.  Kyle soared past him bare seconds later, bottle still in one hand and mostly upright.  Nightwing was still absolutely certain that he was going to fly himself into the side of a building, but he wasn’t sure quite how one went about catching a looping superhero. Besides, it was all he could do to keep up; for someone who probably couldn’t see where he was going, Kyle moved pretty damn fast.

At one point, Kyle vanished and Nightwing started searching for the body, but he zoomed out of a dark alleyway a few minutes later.  When Nightwing finally caught up with him, Kyle had found a tree tall enough that Nightwing didn’t think he could climb it and was distressingly near the top.

“Where are there trees in this city?” Nightwing muttered, standing at the base of the tree and staring up.  He could clearly see Kyle at the top, thanks to the neat little lenses in his mask, but the few people around at this hour apparently couldn’t tell what was up there.

“Who was that?” Nightwing heard.

“Wasn’t it Green Lantern?”

Resisting the urge to facepalm, Nightwing stepped out of the shadows and asked the onlookers to please move to a safer distance away as he had the situation under control.

“Take that and shove it, Hal!” drifted down ever so faintly from above, but the crowd that wasn’t really there was already dispersing and had left Nightwing alone at the base of the ridiculously tall tree.  Kyle was singing something now, and whatever the original tune had been, it was garbled enough that Nightwing had no idea what it might be.  He stared at the tree for a moment, debating on whether or not he could be blamed for just leaving Kyle up there and going home.  With a deep sigh, he started climbing.  Trees and buildings couldn’t be _that_ different.

Roughly halfway up, the singing slurred to a halt and shortly after, the bottle sailed merrily downwards to crash on the ground below.  Nightwing pinched the bridge of his nose and redoubled his efforts.  Once he’d reached Kyle, though, he started wondering again if he really could be blamed for just leaving the man in the damned tree.  There was no way he could carry him back down.  Although he supposed the rest of the Corps might be rather unhappy with him for letting one of their members meet his death at the hands of a tree and a bottle of tequila.  He’d just come to the conclusion that the safest thing to do would be tying Kyle to the tree when something said earlier struck him.

Hal talked himself out of going after Kyle for the third time; they were both mature adults, and Kyle probably needed some time to cool down, and…. Hell with it.  Hal grabbed his jacket. There was no reason the two of them couldn’t talk like reasonable people, and he hadn’t meant to piss his friend off.  He’d just been surprised.  Mostly.  He was on his way out the door when his phone rang.  He was tempted to ignore it, but there was always the off chance that it was important. “Hal Jordan.”

“Green Lantern.”  The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and formal, and Hal couldn’t place it.  “I got your number from Batman,” it added, sounding slightly younger.

“Who… Robin?”  Not that he had any idea what Robin might want with his home number.

“Nightwing.”

“Ah.”  He didn’t know what Nightwing would want with his home number either. “What can I do for you?”

“You can come and get your friend out of this tree,” Nightwing said, sounding distinctly annoyed, and Hal felt a sudden sinking feeling.  “And try not to let him pull any more stunts in my city.”

“Would that be Kyle Rayner?” he asked cautiously.

“Yes,” Nightwing confirmed, and Hal set his ring to scan the New York greater metropolitan area. Kyle’s ring lit up like a beacon; no trouble finding him.

“I’ll be right there.”  The ring was capable of flying through atmosphere at high enough speeds that it didn’t take Hal more than a few minutes to make it most of the way there, and then it was just a matter of fine-tuning the signal.  When he found them, Kyle was unconscious at the top of an actual tree.  Hal had thought Nightwing was using some sort of metaphor.  Nightwing was crouched slightly below him, holding Kyle to the tree with one arm.  “What did you do to him?”

“He did it all on his own,” Nightwing returned curtly, and then sighed.  “Sorry,” he said.  “Look, I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but I do not need drunken escapades from the capes, okay?”

Hal blinked at him, and just barely stopped himself from silently repeating the phrase ‘drunken escapades.’  “Thanks, will do,” he said, and ringed a construct to disentangle both Nightwing and Kyle from the tree.  Nightwing flipped off as soon as the construct was close enough to the ground and nodded thanks before vanishing.  Heading back to Coast City in a bubble took considerably more time than simply flying out had, but Kyle didn’t so much as twitch, not even when Hal carried him into the guest room.  As an afterthought, Hal placed a bucket next to the bed and hoped for the best.

As it turned out, the bucket was unnecessary; Kyle looked remarkably cheerful the next morning for someone who’d been passed out in the top of a tree.  He was, however, wearing incredibly dark sunglasses and Hal could see construct earplugs.  Wordlessly, Hal pushed a mug of coffee towards Kyle.  Kyle, for his part, sat down and took it but only wrapped his hands around the warmth and stared at the dark liquid as if it had some kind of answers.  Or perhaps he’d fallen asleep again – but then his constructs would vanish.  Hal waited.

“Sorry I hit you,” Kyle muttered after a few moments.

Hal shook his head.  “I reacted badly. I’m sorry.”

“Accepted.”  Kyle inhaled the smell of coffee. “You wouldn’t poison this, would you?”

“Of course not!”  Hal’s annoyance was starting to resurface, but then he saw that Kyle was smiling.

“Thanks,” Kyle said, and it wasn’t just for the coffee.  “Are we cool?”

Hal smiled.  “I suppose.”

“Good.” Kyle finally drank the coffee, and then started chuckling. 

“What?” Hal wanted to know.

“Guy wanted to tell you,” Kyle said.  “But I told him he should let me do it, because there was less chance of a fistfight following.”

Hal couldn’t help it.  He laughed, too.


	10. Swish, Swish, Swish

_Swish, swish, swish._   The surface of the bar shone like a mirror, the bottles behind it were neatly stacked, and the floor all but gleamed.  Guy rubbed a damp cloth over the final corner of the bar, removing every microscopic trace of a smudge. Although he wouldn't have admitted it in so many words, restoring order to the bar after a busy night was a kind of stress relief.  It was a way to unwind. 

Bar as clean as it could be, Guy tucked away the rag and listened to the early-morning silence.  A thud from upstairs, followed by the sound of running water, was his cue to reach over and flip a switch on the counter.  Right on schedule, footsteps shuffled down the stairs and a zombie made its way through the neatly organized bar, somehow managing to miss all the furniture in its way.

"Morning," Guy said.

"Nn."  Kyle unerringly reached for a mug and the coffee pot.  "Morning," he said, after he'd added enough sugar and cream (not quite the same as on Earth, but close enough) to ensure that the coffee couldn't possibly taste like coffee, and taken the first sip.

Guy left him to it, taking care of minute details and imaginary dust.  The morning quiet, less peaceful than it had been a few moments ago, was suddenly more enjoyable.  Guy hid a smile, not quite humming under his breath.


	11. Mesh and Paint

No amount of diplomacy was enough to excuse three days spent in a tiny freezing hole in the ground.  No, Guy corrected himself, not even a hole in the ground – it was a hole in a giant piece of rock.  If there had been dirt there, he could have found something flammable and set it on fire.  Or perhaps a ring-ignited campfire would have been too much of a display of power for this backwater rock.  What passed for government on the ball of mud he’d been sent to visit was wary of the Green Lantern Corps and its members, insisting on an inordinate amount of what they called self-restraint and Guy called pure idiocy. By this time, their paranoia was probably justifiable; if it had been up to Guy, he might have just slagged the entire planet and see if the Sinestro Corps or the Red Lanterns or anyone else could use it then.  He had followed orders and played nice, and it had gotten him three days in a hole in the ground at sub-zero temperatures.

Patience was so very overrated.

It had paid off, though – he’d been the conduit for negotiation that just might keep part of this sector safer than it would have been, not to mention ensuring a line of communication between sectors.  It had also taken three days rather than the expected week, possibly because Guy had lost patience after all and hinted in a remarkably subtle fashion that while the Green Lantern Corps was willing to be reasonable, the Yellows and Reds and whatever other colors popped up before this godforsaken mess was resolved might not be so accommodating.  It had been a very small explosion, really.

Finally, finally, Oa was in sight again, where he could get a hot shower and possibly some sleep, among other things.  Kyle was on that list somewhere, too, which made it only efficient to head to his place first and commandeer his shower.

Arriving at Kyle’s door, Guy discovered two things.  First, he’d lost track of enough time in that cave to not realize that he’d reach Oa at the equivalent of three in the morning, and second, that Kyle wasn’t actually in his apartment.  Cursing the Guardians’ particularly poor timing, Guy made use of the shower anyway before returning to his own room above the bar.

His bedroom held the answer to where the Guardians had sent Kyle, which was precisely nowhere.  The light from the uncovered window spilled over Guy’s very definitely occupied bed.  Muttering about an ambush, Guy closed the blinds loudly.  It had no effect on Kyle, who could – and had and would – sleep through anything.  Guy reached out and poked him roughly.  “Move over.”

“Nnn?” While not a word, at least it was an answer.

“I got a bar to run in the morning. I need my beauty sleep.”

“Guy!” Before Guy could so much as blink, he found himself with an armful of clinging Kyle.  There was something odd, though.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Kyle pulled back.  It was too dark to see his face, but his voice was very definitely sheepish.  “I missed you?”

“Right. I got that.  But that don’t explain why you’re only wearin’ my football jersey.  Where’d you even find the damn thing?”

“Uh, in your closet?”

Guy shook his head.  He’d forgotten he even had it; he’d worn it while putting himself through college, playing for Michigan until an injury closed that door.  The jersey must have been in one box or another and gotten dragged along to Oa without him noticing. He supposed there were worse things that could have been unearthed; an old football jersey was, after all, just a shirt. “Uh huh,” was all he said.

A moment passed in silence, and Kyle started to edge toward the door.

“I thought I told you to move over,” Guy said.  He didn’t need to see the resulting brilliant smile to know it was there.


	12. Casper Is Not A Ghost

“You’re not going to stand there and tell me there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Kyle said, just the hint of a smile twitching the corner of his mouth.

  
“No, what I said was the house ain’t haunted.” Guy looked at the old wooden house on its stone foundation without a hint of trepidation. “No reason for a ghost to hang around this dump.”  
  
“That doesn’t make the reports invalid,” Kyle pointed out. There had been trees – or something resembling them – growing around the house at some point, but now they stood leafless and bare. All the house lacked to provide the perfect set for a Halloween horror movie was a bat winging its way across one of the three full moons in the sky and perhaps a couple of headstones in the front yard.  
  
“Haunted house,” Guy muttered. “You ask me, I think the locals just have a collectively overactive imagination.”  
  
“I never thought I’d hear you use words of more than two syllables to tell me someone was making shit up,” Kyle said, amused.   
  
“Ah, shut up.” The flashlight in Guy’s hand slid into a lantern on a pole, high enough off the ground to light the entire area. Kyle forbore from pointing out that the moons provided enough light to see by; it was an odd yellowish green and it made him uneasy. The house had been isolated to begin with, in the foothills of a very impressive mountain range, but as the rumors of ghosts grew, the neighbors had pulled out one by one. Now there was nothing around for miles.  
  
“It could be a ghost.”  
  
“Yeah, well, in that case they sent the wrong Lanterns. I ain’t the one as talks to the dead.”  
  
“Saarek has his own duties. Besides, I thought you liked being the big bad Lantern playing hero at the eleventh hour.”  
  
The look Guy gave him was eloquent enough for full minutes of monologue. Kyle just grinned back shamelessly. “I could always go back for the beer lube.”  
  
“Ha,” Guy snorted. “Do you see anything down there?”  
  
“No, but neither did anyone else until they’d gotten inside the house.” The ring wasn’t giving him information on anything out of the ordinary – there was nothing moving inside the structure or out. “Did you notice the lack of wildlife?”  
  
“Maybe this mudball ain’t got any.” The lantern on the pole split into three, each on the back of a giant mouse. They scampered ahead of Guy, light dimming slightly as they got farther away.  
  
Kyle shook his head. “No, see, there are small mammals out there, and there’s something alive in the hills.”  
  
“Don’t look at me,” Guy said after a moment. “Maybe they just don’t live here.” He paused. “It’s not the mythical ghost,” he added when Kyle just stared at him.   
  
“We’re not going to find it by standing around,” Kyle said, as if he wasn’t the one who’d been dragging his feet to begin with.  
  
The house was no warmer inside than the stiff breeze rushing down from the hills had been, a whistling noise slipping through cracks that didn’t seem to actually exist. It was Earth-like, almost recognizable furniture in almost normal rooms. What looked like a wood stove dominated the kitchen, but a stack of wood just inside the doorway showed no signs of recent use. Kyle opened the stove and started to build a fire.  
  
“What are you doing?”  
  
“It’s cold,” Kyle said.   
  
“It ain’t that cold. Besides, we don’t know what’s in the rest of this place.”  
  
“We scanned the house,” Kyle said, with the air of a reasonable man ostentatiously displaying patience. “There’s nothing here.”  
  
“We’ll see,” Guy said. “I’m gonna check it out.”  
  
“See you back here in a few.” Kyle poked at the logs, which were arranged completely wrong. He’d never get the fire going like that, not without using the ring to ignite it. Guy left him to it.   
  
The gray stone foundation rose halfway up the thin walls of the first floor, relegating the windows to the vicinity of the ceiling and keeping the floor in shadow. Dust covered the windowsills and sparkled in the moonlight. Guy ringed a flashlight and swept the beam across each of the four rooms, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Chairs and a table, a couch, a desk, shelves of books, and a few unrecognizable carvings decorated each room in turn. Guy didn’t notice until he’d reached the stairs that there were no signs of cobwebs; sometimes he thought that no matter where in the galaxy he went, there were spiders. Most planets had something strongly resembling arachnids and their webs, and when they’d landed, this one had been no exception. He’d clearly seen the three-inch eight-legged bastard and scanned it to make sure.   
  
“Nothing on the ground floor,” he called back to Kyle.  
  
“Okay,” Kyle replied, and something thudded to the floor. Guy started towards the kitchen again, but a voluminous flood of cursing told him what had happened.   
  
“Try not to knock over the woodpile,” he added.  
  
“Oh, shut up,” Kyle said, just loudly enough to be heard. Guy chuckled and made his way upstairs.  
  
The stairs were less than sturdy, age and rot no doubt playing a part in destabilizing a structure that didn’t look as if it had been particularly well-constructed to begin with. The dust was thick in the air, and Guy sneezed more than once before he reached the top. The stairway opened up onto a single room, roof supported by a series of shadowy columns. Moonlight poured into the room from every side, bathing it in strips of silver and black. Nothing moved among the columns, nothing but the dust motes drifting through the air. Guy shone his flashlight into the peaked roof, but only shadows fled the beam of green light.   
  
“Nothing,” he said when he returned to the kitchen, but Kyle wasn’t there. The fire burned merrily in the wood stove, and a pot of water was just starting to boil. Guy frowned at it. “Kyle?”  
  
For a brief moment, the moonlight drowned out the firelight, and Guy heard a rushing noise from above. The house shook, a steady sustained rumble growing louder by the second, and he doused the fire before rushing outside. As soon as he cleared the doorway, the sound and motion both ceased. Firelight flickered from inside again, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kyle!”  
  
Cursing, he turned to the ring for Kyle’s location, but the ring only returned an error message. Guy smacked it. “Now,” he growled at it, pushing futilely at the door.  
  
“Guy!” The door opened too suddenly for him to react, and he stumbled to land heavily on the dusty wooden floor. “There you are.”  
  
Kyle stood over him, something that looked far too much like a smirk plastered over his face.  
  
“There I am? Where were you?” Guy stood and dusted himself off, the very epitome of dignity.  
  
“I was right here. How’d you get outside? Are the windows upstairs open?”  
  
“I came through here and you weren’t. What’s with the water?”  
  
“What water?”  
  
“The pot of –“ Guy broke off. There was nothing on top of the wood stove. “Oh, I get it. Nice.”  
  
“What?” Kyle’s face was a little too clueless, even if he wasn’t going to admit to his prank. Guy nodded.   
  
“So where’s this ghost? I got nothing here. Upstairs is empty, so’s the house.”  
  
“I guess we wait.” Kyle poked at the fire with a constructed stick. “If it doesn’t show up, then…” He shrugged.  
  
Midnight – or what passed for it – came and went with nothing other than steadily brightening moonlight; the second and largest of the planet’s three satellites had reached its zenith by the time Kyle suggested flipping for watches for the rest of the night. Guy lost, which was fine by him. He’d gotten plenty of sleep the night before. It didn’t take long before Kyle’s breathing evened out, and Guy was tempted to shake a bucket of water over him, or at least utter a bloodcurdling howl, but he restrained himself. There would be time for pranks later.  
  
The third moon rose higher as the first moon dropped nearly to the horizon; they were distinctly different colors, and the light they cast was irregular. The third moon’s greenish cast had barely enough blue to avoid the label of yellow, while the second moon was almost pink. Guy paced the kitchen, listening to the silence in the rest of the house and wondering if the area got any precipitation. The stars were clearly visible, although dim, and nothing blocked the lunar light.  
  
“No rain tonight,” he muttered to himself, and got up to walk through the rest of the house again. The ground floor remained unchanged, dust thick on the floor and in the air, but a yellowish light was faintly visible at the top of the stairs. Frowning, Guy moved quietly upwards. The light was too steady to be a candle and too warm to have come from any of the moons, but he hadn’t seen any signs of electricity. “Anyone there?” he asked softly, although the ring clearly showed no signs of life.  
  
The yellow light flicked out as soon as the first syllable cleared his throat, leaving the upper floor pitch black. A quick glance downstairs showed him that moonlight still shone into the windows there, but when he looked back up the stairs, the columns were visible in the dark.  
  
“Fucking ghosts,” he muttered. Just to make sure there was absolutely nothing up there, Guy walked around every single column. Twice. He left lanterns hanging in the rafters, banishing every hint of a shadow and pouring warm green light down the stairs. He was nearly back in the kitchen when a high-pitched shriek froze his heart and he dove through the door.  
  
Kyle was crouched against the far wall, hands raised protectively and construct armor covering every inch of skin. Guy could see absolutely no evidence of an actual threat.  
  
“What? What did you see?” he asked, the spiked mace he’d held in both hands fading away.  
  
“Guy?” There was a little more tremor in that voice than should have been there, but given the probability of an actual ghost, Guy wasn’t going to give him much grief over it.  
  
“Who else? There ain’t nothing else here.” Not much wasn’t the same as none, though.  
  
The armor faded, leaving Kyle with a rather sheepish expression. “I thought I saw a spider.”  
  
“A spider,” Guy said flatly and folded his arms. “You screamed like a girl for a spider.”  
  
“I did not scream like a girl and it was huge.” Kyle hesitated. “There were cobwebs from floor to ceiling. I woke up and I couldn’t move.”  
  
“You screamed like a girl for a nightmare,” Guy said, and started laughing. “Man, this is way better than I thought it would be.”  
  
“It wasn’t a dream!” Kyle protested hotly. Guy pointedly looked around the cobweb-free and spiderless kitchen. “I mean…”  
  
“Still a rookie, huh?” Guy smirked. “The house is still empty, by the way.”  
  
“Rookie my ass,” Kyle muttered. “My watch now.”  
  
“Sure. Then I get to see if you hallucinate anything else.” Guy made himself comfortable on a construct armchair in front of the wood stove, stretching his hands out towards the heat. The room seemed colder than it had a few moments before.  
  
“I was not hallucinating!” Kyle had manifested a suit of armor again, albeit a much less bulky set than the one he’d had before. Guy wasn’t sure he was doing it on purpose, either, which meant that his partner was really rattled. It made it so much easier to push his buttons.  
  
“So you were dreaming?” he asked innocently.  
  
“Oh, shut up.” Kyle seemed to notice the armor for the first time and it faded to his normal uniform. “Shut up and go to sleep.”  
  
Guy smirked again. “We could be doing other things.”  
  
“I’m going upstairs to look for ghosts,” Kyle said after a moment of staring at him with an unreadable face.  
  
“Nothing up there,” Guy called after him. Kyle pulled a face and started to inspect the rest of the first floor as well, or at least the room adjacent to the kitchen.  
  
“Why don’t you check outside?” he shouted back.  
  
“All sightings were in the house,” Guy said through the ring.   
  
“See if the outside of the house matches the inside,” Kyle said, somewhat inexplicably.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” It was warmer outside than inside, oddly enough, although half of it could have been atmosphere. “Fucking ghost,” Guy muttered, and promptly slipped on a patch of mud. It clung to the outside of his costume, and he brushed it off with a construct. The wet, slimy feeling didn’t go away, though. “So what am I supposed to match?” he asked.  
  
The ring was silent, and Guy smacked it a second time. The outside of the house was perfectly normal, high windows dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought he saw a curtain fluttering on the second floor, but when he looked more closely, there was nothing. “The windows are glass and closed, you idiot,” he muttered to himself. “Yo, Kyle,” he added, boosting the transmission.  
  
The silence from the ring was starting to get suspicious. Guy willed himself far enough off the ground to be able to see inside the windows. They were not only dark, they were opaque from the outside. He thumped one in frustration, and the entire house shook.  
  
“I thought you said this structure was stable,” he said to the ring. It returned an error message for the second time. “Okay, that’s it. You’re going to Mogo for a tuneup.” The sound he got back could only be described as a raspberry. Guy returned to the ground, peering into the high windows on the first floor; he could see Kyle moving through the third room carrying an old-fashioned flaming torch. Guy took a moment to just watch – Kyle moved efficiently now, no wasted gestures, no melodramatics – and noticed the door on the far side of the room for the first time. His first thought was chagrin that he’d noticed something so obvious. His second was that there was no way he could have missed something that obvious – the rooms on the first floor were arranged in an arc, and any door in that particular wall would have opened straight into the back of the kitchen.  
  
The door opened onto a hallway leading straight back, with a stairway curving down at the end of it. The hair on the back of Guy’s neck stood up at the physical impossibility. Why didn’t Kyle see how much that didn’t fit? Guy pounded on the window, but his efforts didn’t even produce a dull thud. “Kyle!” Going down that hallway was a very very bad idea, it couldn’t possibly exist and – Guy shouted again. “KYLE!”   
  
The door stuck on the uneven floor and Kyle paused to tug at it. Guy raced around the side of the building to the kitchen, flinging the door open. “Don’t go in there!” he shouted, moving as fast as humanly possible through the doorways. He would have gone through the walls if he’d thought it wouldn’t either rip the fabric of space-time or collapse the entire house.  
  
The third room was empty and the door in the wall was gone. Guy rushed over to it, but he couldn’t even see footprints in the dust. There was nothing left. He kicked the wall where the door had been, hoping against hope to see something, but the door didn’t reappear. He hit the wall again, running his hands over it and searching for any sign of an opening. There was nothing. “I’ll burn you down,” he growled. “Give him back, damn you. Give him back!”  
  
“Give what back?” Kyle said from the doorway, and Guy nearly climbed the wall.  
  
“Where did you come from?” he demanded once his heart had dropped back out of his throat.  
  
“The second floor?” Kyle gestured vaguely behind himself. “Empty, like you said.”  
  
“You didn’t go into the hallway?” Guy thumped the wall, which remained stubbornly solid and door-less.  
  
“What hallway?” Again, Kyle’s clueless look was a little too bland.  
  
“I saw you. Through the window. In this room. There was a door, right here, and you opened it onto a hallway.” He sketched out the outline of the doorframe.  
  
Kyle peered at him quizzically for a moment. “Guy, there couldn’t possibly be a hallway right there. The kitchen’s on the other side of that wall.”  
  
“Well, I know that. I didn’t thi—never mind.” Guy gave the wall another once-over and then looked back at his partner.  
  
“Now who’s hallucinating?” It was far too cheerful of a grin. Guy ringed a snowball and threw it. Kyle blocked it with a hastily erected shield and within a fraction of a second the room was full of snow. He scooped up a handful and lobbed it back and before he knew it, he was soaked in the snowballs he’d missed.  
  
“Oh, that’s it,” he said, loose-packed a double handful and dove after Kyle. Twenty-three seconds of squirming later, Kyle was modifying his costume to get rid of the snow down his back.   
  
“It’s cold,” he complained.   
  
“Pansy,” Guy said, but the room really was freezing. He let the snow dissolve, not that it made much of a difference; Kyle had been making most of it. “Let the construct go and it’ll get warmer.”  
  
“I’m not doing that,” Kyle said, pausing in the brushing of snow off his back. “I thought you were.”  
  
Guy straightened, ring sparking. “Ghostly manifestations?”  
  
“Could be.” Kyle’s uniform was back in place before Guy could blink. “Any other signs?”   
  
A door somewhere else in the house slammed shut.  
  
“That could be a sign,” Guy said.  
  
“Hello?” Kyle said softly. “Are you there?”  
  
Nothing answered him except the dripping sound of slowly melting snow.   
  
“Hey,” Kyle said. “Look at the snow.”  
  
Guy looked – it was snow, smooth and greenish-white. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, and he said so.  
  
“Where are our footprints?” Kyle asked quietly, and the hair on the back of Guy’s neck stood up again. The snow was as pristine as if it had just fallen, with no sign that the two of them had just torn it up. As soon as he really looked at it, it faded away to dust. Even the moisture in his clothes vanished. “I’d say that’s a sign of paranormal activity.”  
  
“Ring,” Guy said, not that he expected anything out of it. To his surprise, it registered a faint energy signature emanating from somewhere beneath the floor.  
  
“Did you notice the moonlight?” Kyle asked, and his ring confirmed that the modified solar radiation coming from each of the three satellites appeared to be acting as an amplifier to the energy signature.  
  
“It eats it,” Guy said.   
  
“The signal’s getting stronger. If this is a friendly ghost, it might be able to come out and talk.”  
  
“What is this, Casper? What part of your experience leads you to assume the ghost is friendly?”  
  
The house rumbled alarmingly, floor trembling and then shaking, tumbling the furniture across the ground. Guy lost his balance and slammed into the wall where the door had been, feeling it give way as the door opened inwards. “Kyle!” He slipped across the threshold and grabbed the doorframe, feeling it vibrate beneath his fingers.  
  
“Hang on!” Kyle ringed a support web around the room, trying to keep the house from collapsing in on itself in its increasingly violent throes. The house responded by shuddering harder, pieces of the ceiling falling in as it tilted sideways. Guy felt his grip slipping, but the ring wouldn’t generate enough energy to pull him back through the doorway. Something grabbed his foot from behind, and he kicked down desperately.  
  
“I got you!” Kyle was clinging to his own construct for dear life and his other hand was on Guy’s wrist. Guy cleared the doorway just as it dissolved into a wall again, but the house didn’t stop shaking, and the wind outside had picked up to a dull roar.   
  
“Outside!” he shouted over the noise. Kyle nodded, but no matter how far they got, the house’s gyrations landed them back in the center of the room. The far wall cracked down the center with a sharp report, and Guy suddenly realized that the ceiling was intact.   
  
“You cut that out!” he shouted into the storm, planting his feet onto the floor. “I ain’t playing your game anymore.”  
  
The opaque shield cutting the house off from the moons wasn’t easy, but Guy slammed it into place, driving it six inches into the earth at the house’s foundations and cutting off all light except the green glow of Kyle’s construct.  
  
“Guy?” Kyle followed Guy’s pointing finger to the intact ceiling and his eyes widened. “Oh.” Indignation spread across his face. “Hey! We got punked!” The rumbling faded away to nothing, the house still and quiet. The furniture hadn’t moved more than Kyle’s now-vanishing construct could account for, and several sets of their footprints were clearly visible in the thick dust.  
  
“Casper here ain’t really shaking the house,” Guy said, just for the sake of exposition. Let the ghost know they’d figured out its game. “It’s all illusion. I think he just likes playing pranks.”  
  
“Salakk to Lanterns Gardner and Rayner,” came a voice through Kyle’s ring, staticky at first and then becoming clearer.  
  
“We read you,” Kyle said. “What’s up?”  
  
“We’ve just had communication from your assigned location. Apparently the local apparition is an interplanar being that feeds off lunar radiation. It comes out to play tricks on a regular basis.”  
  
“Yeah?” Guy said, grabbing Kyle’s hand and talking into his ring. “Then why’d they call us with horror stories of ghosts?”  
  
“The last time the planet’s moons were in the proper alignment, other conditions prevented its manifestation,” Salakk replied calmly. “There was no living memory, only – how would you put this – tall tales.”  
  
“And somebody finally remembered?” Guy said, but Kyle yanked his hand away mid-sentence.   
  
“So they don’t need us?” he asked. Blue light flickered hopefully through a doorway, illuminating giant cobwebs.  
  
“You’re clear to return home,” Salakk said. “Report back immediately.”  
  
“Understood,” Kyle said. “Come on, Guy.”  
  
Guy doused the fire in the stove as they walked past. “Bye bye, Casper.” The house rumbled once again, briefly, but Guy didn’t let the shield up until they were well above the planet’s surface.  
  
“Fucking ghosts,” he muttered again as they made tracks for Oa.  
  
Salakk was waiting for them, to all appearances the very epitome of calm.  
  
“I can’t believe you sent us chasing after Casper,” Guy said before he’d properly gotten both feet on the ground.  
  
“…Casper?” Salakk said cautiously, with the air of a man unsure of really wanting the answer to his question.  
  
“The friendly ghost,” Kyle said. “Never mind,” he added, almost on top of his own words. “So everything’s fine? No threat?”  
  
“I did not say it wasn’t dangerous,” Salakk said after a moment’s solemn stare. “Denizens of his particular level of existence are extremely capricious. Quite outside a Lantern’s purview, I assure you.”  
  
“Wait, that thing could have killed us?” Guy said as Kyle asked, “What about the locals?”  
  
“It would most likely have left your bodies intact,” Salakk mused, almost absentmindedly. “Oh, don’t worry,” he added. “The local scientific community is working on a solution, but the moons are only in the appropriate alignment every hundred years or so. There is no particular urgency.”  
  
“Fucking ghosts.”   
  
Kyle kicked Guy’s ankle and pushed him out the door. “Let’s go, Guy. Thank you, Salakk.”  
  
“Did they fall for it?” Kilowog poked his head around the doorframe a moment later.   
  
“Fall for what?” Salakk asked.  
  
“The Halloween prank? Big tradition where those two come from?”  
  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kilowog.”  
  
“Could’ve fooled me,” Kilowog muttered, but he withdrew.   
  
“Gotcha,” Salakk whispered, allowing the smallest of smiles to hush across his face before he returned to his duties.


	13. Not In The Plan

His first thanksgiving, after the ring, hadn’t been a day he wanted to remember. It hadn’t been a day Kyle particularly wanted to forget, either, it had just sort of passed before he’d noticed anything happening. Only a phone call from home asking what he’d been doing reminded him of the holiday at all.   
  
Each successive year had been the same, always something in the way, something that distracted him from the holiday, but he’d still managed to call home after that first year. Even when he eventually, he’d left Earth behind altogether, and its holidays had become all but meaningless, he still found a way to talk to his mother, the only family he really had left. Then she’d been killed, and it had been his fault, and holidays really were pointless after that.   
  
Still, there were moments he found to reflect on the things he had to be thankful for, and even when he cursed the Guardians, the Manhunters, and Hal Jordan for the roles they’d played in his ending up with the ring, he had to admit that he wouldn’t have given it up for the world.   
  
_This year, maybe…_  he’d thought, after surviving Sinestro and the Spider Guild and  _Guy_  and permanently moving to Oa, but his last-minute possible plans had been derailed by a sudden mission, and Guy had seemed too preoccupied by something for Kyle to want to interrupt.  
  
Once Guy had left home, he’d never looked back. No, that wasn’t quite true. He was too much the dutiful son at first, and he couldn’t abandon his family. Thanksgiving was the one day of the year that he’d always set aside to spend at home, and every year it was full of cold glares and awkward silences.  
  
The first year, his father had started in with the comments and the little barbed insults, as if he thought Guy wouldn’t understand. He’d walked out the door without a word; later he’d told his mother that he refused to go home only to be insulted. After that, his father simply never spoke to him at all.  
  
Ending up with the ring and then in the Phantom Zone and later in the coma had changed everything; obviously he wouldn’t be participating in any family events then, and even after waking up, he’d felt no desire to exhibit filial piety.   
  
No, Guy Gardner didn’t pay any attention to any holiday except Halloween.  
  
This year, though, this year was supposed to have been just a little different. He’d actually made plans to host Thanksgiving at the bar, teach the Corps and its members from so many disparate cultures about this tradition of giving thanks, or at least expressing it. He  _had_  planned to surprise Kyle with it; not for any mushy reasons or anything, but just because a guy had to remember home once in a while, and now seemed like a good time. Then, of course, the Guardians had sent the both of them off to find some obscure plant and ruined all of his careful plots.   
  
“You know what day today is, right?” Kyle asked. He was on top of Guy, leaning around the half-height stone wall that was their only cover from what looked to Guy like nothing so much as a dragon. It was well over fifty feet long, sported six limbs with massive claws tipping each of its toes, and its whipping tail was spiked. None of this was particularly problematic.  
  
“I don’t care what day it is.” He’d taken a bite to the chest from the dragon’s massive mouth, and only luck and a quick construct had saved him from being crushed. As if zillions of pounds per square inch of jaw strength wasn’t enough, the creature’s bite had to be poisoned as well. It made Guy wonder what else lived on this miserable ice ball.   
  
“It’s Thanksgiving,” Kyle told him. “Look, just past midnight.” He held up a glowing green clock. “Happy Turkey Day.”  
  
“Ha,” Guy grumbled. He couldn’t move, or at least he couldn’t coordinate his movements, and his head was fuzzy enough that any construct he tried to make went utterly wacky. “I don’t think I share the sentiment.” At least he could still speak.  
  
“Three-syllable words? You really aren’t feeling well.” Kyle sent another blast towards the dragon, but the damn thing was fast enough to avoid it. “Look, I can come back for Natu’s plant.”  
  
“Fuck that. We came here for the fucking thing and we are damn well going home with it.” There was apparently some kind of flowering vine that lived under the ice and had regenerative properties in a majority of the sentient species across the galaxy. What Natu had not told them was that the plant survived by growing in manure – and the dragon hadn’t been far away. “Fucking lizard,” Guy muttered.  
  
“Stay here.” Kyle was about to charge at the damn thing and that never ended well. If it weren’t for a necrotic plague afflicting star systems in at least two sectors, Guy would have told him that they were going home. Too many lives were at stake to give up now, though, and getting the plant meant that they needed a plan. Guy managed to grab Kyle’s wrist.  
  
“I’ll distract it. Then you go.” Having manipulated his recalcitrant body enough to restrain Kyle, he now managed to get it into an upright position. The more he moved, the easier it got, and the ring was counteracting the poison. Give it a few moments and he would be as good as new.  
  
Kyle hesitated. “Are you sure?”  
  
“Always,” Guy said, and launched himself straight upwards. At least, he meant to go straight up, but the world spun around him and he went with it. The dragon missed him, though, and he dodged and looped enough to draw it away from the too-precious patch of weeds. He saw Kyle dart in out of the corner of his eye, pulling thread after thread of the plant out of the ground, and spared a bit of his concentration to smash the dragon with a construct.  
  
His lack of focus nearly cost him his life; the dragon evaded his clumsy fist with ease and snaked out its neck. He jumped aside, nearly flying straight into its barbed tail. Only dropping like a stone saved him from getting skewered again, and he bounced off the earth with only a little help from the ring. Kyle caught him mid-bounce and dragged him out of the atmosphere.  
  
“Got it?” Guy asked.  
  
Kyle patted a construct messenger bag hugging his other hip. “And then some.”  
  
Soranik all but yanked the bag out of Kyle’s hands when they reached Oa – if it hadn’t been directly in the line of flight between the ice ball and the plague planets, they wouldn’t have stopped there at all – and Guy got far less viewable scenery to stitch him up. He slept through part of his recovery, and was woken by Kyle dropping a kiss on his forehead.  
  
“Going somewhere?” he asked.  
  
“Uh,” Kyle said. He was a rotten liar.  
  
“Spit it out.” Guy stood up. He was stiffer than he’d been in a good long while, and it hurt like hell to move, but the poison was gone.  
  
“I’m – we’re immune to the plague, so I’m taking the antidote,” Kyle said. “I’ll be back soon.”  
  
“Since when do Honor Guard Lanterns play courier?”   
  
“Uh, since we’re really really fast,” Kyle said lamely. At Guy’s dubious look, he gave in. “All right, all right, there have been reports of Sinestro Corps activity between here and there, and there’s apparently the possibility that they might try to intercept the courier. Okay?”  
  
“You just got yourself some backup.” Guy overrode all of Kyle’s protests by the simple expedient of asking his ring for the destination of the plague vaccine and starting towards it.  
  
“Okay, okay!” Kyle flew after him, vaccine safe in a construct that resembled a too-close-fitting backpack. “Any sign of trouble, though, and I stay between you and it.”  
  
“Yes, mother.” He rolled his eyes, secure in the knowledge that Kyle couldn’t see it from way up in front of him.  
  
“I saw that,” Kyle called back without turning around.  
  
“No, you didn’t.” There was no way.  
  
“You rolled your eyes.” Kyle sounded far too sure of himself. Guy hadn’t  _seen_  a mirror, but perhaps he’d missed Kyle ringing one.  
  
“You’re just guessing,” he said, testing the waters.  
  
“And I was right,” Kyle said.   
  
“Ha, you admitted it first. I win.” Guy moved above Kyle, taking the defensive position without thinking about it.  
  
“Fine.” Kyle sounded more amused than anything else. The trip progressed remarkably uneventfully, given how twitchy Kyle had been about trying not to tell Guy that he was going somewhere, and the vaccine made it into the hands of the people who could distribute it most effectively without incident. Given how quickly the Green Lantern ring could travel, though, they ended up staying far longer than they had thought, providing logistical support over a network spanning eleven planets in eight star systems.   
  
“You sure that wasn’t contagious?” Guy said as they finally left the plague behind. The crisis was far from over, but there was nothing more that the two of them could provide that couldn’t be done by the residents of the planets themselves, and Salakk had recalled them upon hearing their report.  
  
“Just think if something like that got loose on Earth,” Kyle said. “I mean…”  
  
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t us this time. Maybe there’s something to Thanksgiving in space.”  
  
“Sorry,” Kyle said. “You missed it. Thanksgiving was over twelve minutes ago.”  
  
“There’s more than one time zone –“ Guy started.  
  
“In Hawaii,” Kyle said.   
  
“Better late than never,” Guy told him, and slung an arm around Kyle’s waist. “I got a lot to be thankful for this year.” Perhaps he could salvage something out of the day after all.


	14. Oa Gets A Pool Why, Again?

The latest idea was a swimming pool; not for laps, because there were several structures with various liquids intended to teach rookie Lanterns how to swim, but for fun.  
  
“Oa has oceans,” Kyle pointed out. “Most of the Lanterns who go swimming do it there.”  
  
“But not waterslides,” Guy said, grinning. There wasn’t quite enough open space behind the bar for a traditional waterpark, but Guy was nothing if not creative when it came to getting what he wanted. Give him an obstacle and he went around it, over it, even through it.  
  
“We can  _fly_ ,” Kyle returned, the thought having just occurred to him. Still, flight or no flight, slides were bizarrely entertaining.   
  
“So? It’ll be fun.” There was that word again. “Earth customs.”  
  
“I think you just don’t want to go farther than from the back yard for beer.” Actually, the idea of a pool behind the bar was becoming more appealing the more he thought about it.   
  
“Yeah,” Guy said, sliding an arm around Kyle’s waist. “Can’t argue with that.”  
  
Kyle leaned against him. “Nope. Besides, it’ll annoy Sala **a** k.”  
  
“Now you speak my language.” A quick kiss on the cheek and Guy wandered off. “Thanks for writing the proposal, Kyle.”  
  
“Ha.” Kyle jogged after him. “You write it, I’ll submit it.”  
  
“Who runs this bar, anyway?”   
  
“I do,” Kyle said, and laughed at the look of indignant incredulity that Guy gave him, and he laughed harder when Guy started chuckling in response. He wouldn’t have changed any of it for the world.


	15. If You Can't Stand The Heat

Nothing strange had happened all day, except for the box. There had been a box in front of the central battery. A rather large box, smooth-sided and with no apparent cracks or hinges. It almost looked like a rock, except that it sounded hollow when Guy thumped it. Even then, it wouldn’t have counted as a bad sign. There was just one thing about the box that made Guy a little cranky, and that was that the box had had the temerity to explode.  
  
The sound was loud enough to be heard throughout the city, although Guy managed to contain the blast so perfectly that not even a wisp of smoke escaped. He crushed what remained of the box into a perfect sphere and stalked off to find Salaak.  
  
The box turned out to be a test – although what it was doing in front of the central battery was anyone’s guess. Guy didn’t remember giant bombs being part of the training equipment, but apparently it had been updated since he’d been through the program. Salaak suspected a prank, which meant that his name was the first to come up.  
  
“Why would I defuse my own prank?” Guy demanded. Salaak gave him a flat stare that clearly stated he had no idea what imbecility Guy would or would not perpetrate. “It wasn’t me,” Guy said again.  
  
“Oh, you got it,” Kyle said, popping up behind Guy in an utterly silent approach.  
  
“That was you?”  
  
“No, that was –“ Kyle waved towards a group of trainees. “Well, he picked it up and threw it. It went farther than I thought it would.”  
  
“Why didn’t you catch it?”  
  
“Well, I thought one of them would have been able to get it and by the time they all missed, it was out of sight. I’m glad you found it, though, because I think it was about to explode.”  
  
“You were watching!” Guy said. Kyle grinned, completely unrepentantly.   
  
“Maybe just a little,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have let it go boom.”  
  
“There are other ways to say good morning,” Guy informed him, patiently.  
  
“I love you too,” Kyle said, smile even wider.  
  
“Get back to work,” Guy grumbled.  
  
He’d broken up six fights, pulled a merchant convoy out of an ion storm, and stabilized two continents – on the same planet – by the time something else even remotely interesting happened, which was that the keys to the bar vanished. A lock that could have been opened via ring would have been meaningless on Oa, and it wasn’t that Guy felt that the lock was necessary to prevent his property from walking off, but the locked door meant that the bar was closed.   
  
“There is no point to having an unpickable lock,” Guy muttered. “Lose the keys and poof.” He paused. “Kyle!”  
  
“I don’t have the keys,” came the answer, no beats missed.  
  
“I ain’t breakin’ the window.”  
  
“Go in the back?” Something thumped, and Kyle cursed. “Go in another window? I don’t know where the keys are, Guy.”  
  
It wasn’t that he couldn’t get in, it was the principle of being able to lock the door at the end of the day and open it at the beginning. Guy climbed in through an open window on the second floor and found the keys under Kyle’s pillow. Instead of moving them, he tied fishing line from the keys to a trigger which pulled a thicker rope and hit a hammer that finally emptied a bucket of water over the bed. None of it was constructed and therefore it couldn’t be dissolved with the ring.  
  
“Did you find them?” Kyle called from downstairs.  
  
“Uh,” Guy said. “How did you get in?”  
  
“Back door,” Kyle answered, jogging up the stairs. “Did you check in here?”  
  
“Yes,” Guy said, and vacated the room. It was perfectly truthful. “I don’t see them,” he added from outside. That was also truthful; they were under an opaque pillow.  
  
A thud followed by a loud splash made him smile, but Kyle was perfectly dry and the water followed him in a little bubble as he chased Guy down the stairs.   
  
“Take it like a man,” Kyle called after him. Guy poked the bubble with a constructed pin, but it wasn’t balloon-ish enough to pop. It did leak, and a slow spiral of water spilled out as Kyle launched it towards him. Guy ducked and the water hit the wall.   
  
“Missed!” he called back.  
  
“That’s one-one, then,” Kyle said.  
  
“You wanna call it a draw?” Guy offered.  
  
“Only if we get to introduce our customers to the fabulous concept of April Fool’s Day,” Kyle returned, brightly.  
  
“It ain’t April,” Guy pointed out. “You do know that.”  
  
“Yeah, so?”   
  
“You’re good,” Guy said. “But not as good as me.”  
  
“Yeah? See who pulls off the most spectacular stunt.” Kyle stuck out his hand. “From now until the bar closes.”  
  
“You’re on,” Guy said, reaching past Kyle’s oustretched hand and tugging the keys away. Where  _had_  Kyle gotten the little electric shock button hidden in his palm? Kyle shrugged and followed him down the stairs.  
  
The doors swung open.


	16. How Not To Survey An Alien Planet

“What’s on this dirtball?” Guy asked, giving the slowly rotating sphere below them a look of distaste.  It was a smoky green color, sparkling where the clouds parted and allowed the orange sun’s light to hit the ground below.

“Uh,” Kyle said, and consulted the ring.  It helpfully informed him that the survey results were out of date and should not be treated as necessarily accurate, which didn’t tell either of them anything at all.  “What were the previous survey results?”

“Forget it,” Guy said.  “We’ve got a list, checking it twice, yadda yadda yadda.”

“That’s Christmas,” Kyle pointed out.  “It’s not Christmas.”

“Whatever.”  Guy glanced over his shoulder and smirked.  “Shouldn’t argue in front of the kids, darling. It’s bad for their development.”

“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” Kyle turned to the team of recruits on a field trip.  Today’s lesson was how to survey a previously unknown planet, or one that had shown no activity for long enough that no reliable records remained.  In theory, the Guardians knew everything about everywhere, but in practice, there was too much upheaval to really keep track of _everything_ , and the rural areas tended to fall through the cracks. “Okay, people.  Here’s what you do.”

The new kids were near the end of their training period; most of them had at least some kind of experience with one aspect or another of a Green Lantern’s duties, but none of today’s bunch had ever been part of a planetary survey team.  They would kill the proverbial two birds with a single stone by catching up on this sector while training the recruits, no trouble expected.  Kyle laid out the game plan and ignored Guy’s mocking.  He didn’t have to look at his partner to know more or less what was going on behind him.

“Okay, first observe, then split into pairs and take your sectors.”

“Is there a reason they gotta watch us do it before they go down there?” Guy asked, for Kyle’s ears alone.  “They ain’t idiots or they wouldn’t be here. “ He paused.  “Wait, then again, they inducted Hal. Never mind, they should watch first.”

“Very funny.”  Kyle dove straight down, to the island that he and Guy would use to demonstrate the proper survey technique.  The cadets followed, hovering in a low earth orbit and observing via the ring. 

“Initial survey,” Guy said, completely seriously.  The verbal phrase triggered the ring’s programming and gave them a summary of the data it recorded. 

The first cycle – the broadest-ranged – confirmed that the planet’s atmosphere hadn’t changed from a fairly standard oxygen/nitrogen mix and that the tectonic plates were mostly where they were expected to be, although a few of them were shuddering enough to cause some minor tremors. The second cycle told them that there were no signs of sentient life on the island; no artificial structures, no energy signatures, and no broadcast transmissions.  The third cycle checked for what was and wasn’t growing out of the ground, by which point Kyle could tell Guy was getting bored.  For that matter, so was he.

“List of flora approximates the previous report,” Kyle said for the recruits’ benefit.  “There are several new species and some of the plants recorded on the previous survey appear to be extinct, but the ecological niches haven’t really changed.”

“Great. Plants,” Guy said.  “There are still plants.”

“Yes, and probably none of them will eat you if you step on them,” Kyle said.

“Yay.”  Guy rolled his eyes.  “How many of the old ones were poisonous?”

“Depends.  To us? All of them. To them?” Kyle waved back at the group of recruits. “Yeah, I don’t know. The ring knows.”

“Wonderful. Keep the ring on, then.”

“And then there are the animals.”  It wasn’t a particularly large island, which was why it had been chosen as a demonstration. Surveying a planet was labor-intensive and time-consuming even with the ring, which was part of the reason Kyle did not like the uninhabited ones.  “Not much change here either; there are a few species of carnivore in varying sizes, herbivores for them to eat, and lots of bugs.”

“What’s new?” Guy was scrolling through the list even as he asked.

“Uh, just a few are missing and then there’s a whole host of new creepy crawlies.” Kyle paused.  “And whatever that is, because it sort of matches this on the list here, but I don’t think plant-eaters have sharp teeth.”

“No, that’s weird.”  Guy grabbed Kyle’s hand and scrolled through his display.

“Hey, cut that out. You’ve got your own.” Kyle retrieved his limb.  “Let’s go down and take a look.”

“The main advantage here,” Guy said over Kyle’s shoulder, “is that the ring sends the information back to Oa without needing any other equipment. Keeps your hands free.”

“Okay, then, we check the new things, make sure the old ones are probably no longer there, and we’re good.” Kyle let his display vanish as they descended through the atmosphere and ignored Guy’s muttering about easier said than done.  It was darker than he’d expected once they broke through the cloud cover, but the island sat in a sparkling ocean.  Huge dark shapes moved ponderously through the water, too deep for any detail to be visible.

“No swimming,” Guy said, pointing down.  “Think they have teeth?”

“They could be whales,” Kyle said, but he vaguely remembered the list of marine life including a large number of predators.

“Whales with teeth,” Guy said.

“At least it’s not a space whale.”  The shape nearest them surfaced for a brief second, just long enough for Kyle to catch a glimpse of scarred grayish-green skin and a huge baleful eye.

“Space whales don’t exist.”  Guy peered down at the sinking behemoth before resuming flight towards the bit of sand poking up out of the surf.  “At least, I ain’t never seen one.”

“Bet Hal has.”

“Ah, shut up.”  The island sat directly below them, huge trees in the center sporting reddish leaves giving way to orange scrub nearer to the beach.  From their much closer vantage point, several of the earlier discrepancies against the previously recorded list resolved into not unexpected advantageous mutations and further development of the species in question.  “Look, our workload just got lighter.”

Kyle landed on the sand, which was appropriately sand-colored and studded with small gray rocks.  “What do you want to find first, oh mighty hunter?”

“Three creepy crawlies, the bunnies with fangs, and a bunch of plants.” Guy landed beside him, kicking a rock out of the way.  The ground shook enough to send the rock bouncing farther than he’d intended, and Guy wondered briefly if the tremors were going to stop any time soon.  The previous report hadn’t noted an excess amount of seismic activity. 

“If you’re not going to answer, I vote bunnies,” Kyle said helpfully.  

Hours later, he would curse those words.  In trying to actually catch one of the elusive space rabbits, every other item on the list presented itself.  The flora was still all poisonous and all three of the insects in question had developed sharp and pointy appendages; Kyle was now sporting green bandaids on four fingers and across his face and complaining about every single one of them.

“I don’t think the bunnies actually exist,” he said, poking at a particularly deep slash across the third finger of his left hand.  “I think the rings just _made them up_.”

“They don’t do that.”  Guy had made a note in the survey data as to the poisons excreted by the newly developed insect life; if Kyle hadn’t had a ring, he would probably have been dead after the first bite.  As it was, the greatest weapon in the universe had the fabulous side effect of protecting its wearer against most deadly poisons and toxins.  Guy was starting to suspect other side effects of the pointy little insects, though.  “The damn things are right underneath us.”

“I don’t see them.”

The foliage in the way was lush and thick, in every way a perfect example of a healthy ecosystem.  Guy wanted nothing more than to burn it to the ground, catch the damn space rabbit, and go home.  “The ring says they’re there. They must be there.”

“Excuse me, Honor Lantern Gardner.”  One of the rookies spoke through the ring, voice a little shaky. 

“What?” Guy snapped.

“Well, we think we’ve got the, uh, the technique. Should we split up and start?”

“Yes,” Kyle broke in.  “Bonus points for whoever finishes their assigned sections first.”

“This is not a race!” Guy hissed.  Speed would make the rookies sloppy, and he would be the one rechecking all of their undoubtedly highly suspect data.

“It is now,” Kyle said.  He stared straight down for a moment.  “I still don’t think they’re actually there.”

“Of course they –“ Guy started, but Kyle ignored him entirely in favor of diving straight down below the trees.  “Where are you going?”

“We’ll never find them from way up there,” Kyle said, waving vaguely backwards.  “Gotta get in there.”

“Great.”  Guy landed in the bluish muck, barely half a second after Kyle’s warning for sticky sticky mud. “And yuck.”

“Skoosh.” Kyle grinned, pulling his feet out of the muck with horrible sucking noises.  Guy was almost sure now that Kyle’s poisonous insects were affecting his state of mind, but mostly that just meant there was one more note to make in the report.

“Bunnies, Kyle. Focus.”  His ring beeped, claiming that the rabbits were swarming around their feet at that very moment.

“Maybe they dig,” Kyle offered. 

“Maybe,” Guy started, staring at the ground.  A flash of motion out of the corner of his eye led him to turn around in just enough time to receive a flying double handful of mud to the face.  “What the fuck, Kyle!”

Delighted laughter floated up and around behind him, and Guy managed to combine a brilliant evasive maneuver and the removal of mud from the general vicinity of his eyes.  The second handful of mud whizzed past to splat onto the ground, just as he’d suspected.

“You cheated,” Kyle complained, but he was still grinning.

“Dodging ain’t cheating,” Guy retorted, and used the ring to excavate a massive heap of bluish sticky clay.  Kyle leapt to the side, but a sudden rumbling underground nearly knocked Guy off his feet. “What the hell is that?”

The island shook, vibrating almost visibly as the waves rose higher.  Guy took off, hovering above the water, and only quick reflexes saved him from an underwater leviathan and its set of what turned out to be very large and pointy teeth on a long and flexible neck. 

“Earthquake!” Kyle shouted, without the slightest bit of caution warranted a seismic event on the scale Guy’s ring had detected.  “Everybody off the ground!”

Most earthquakes wouldn’t have required a planet-wide evacuation, but Guy’s ring informed him that every tectonic plate was in a state of motion.  Half the teams hadn’t even made it to their assigned sections and most of the rest hadn’t managed to progress beyond aerially identifying the largest of the flora.

“What the hell,” he muttered again.  There was no planetary trigger for the tremors, nothing on the surface or under it that could account for so much motion, and he was so busy trying to figure out where the quake had come from that it took him nearly a full minute to notice that Kyle had vanished.

“That damn bunny,” Kyle said in answer to Guy’s shouted hail.  “Last thing on the list.”

“Get – ignore the bunny.”  The tremors were getting worse, huge waves crashing over the shore.  “Kyle!”

The ring acted effectively enough as a beacon when Kyle refused to answer; Guy dodged falling trees and pounding surf and finally managed to find his partner.

“I got it!” Kyle turned to face him, framed by roiling gray clouds over a yellowish-green ocean, a veritable wall of water bearing down on them both, and held up a pinkish-furred creature with incongruously long ears.  As he raised his arm, it twisted in his grip to bury inch-long fangs in his wrist.  “Dammit!” he cursed, and started to pry it off.

“Move!” Guy shouted as the bunny fell, and yanked him upwards.  “Fucking bugs,” he muttered, and the apex of the wave just barely missed the bottom of Kyle’s feet.  There were going to be way too many notes to make in this particular report.

“Honor Lantern Gardner?” came another hesitant voice through his ring.

“What?” he snapped.

“I think the neighboring planet is about to crash into this one,” the rookie said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”  He’d said that far too often on this trip out; next time it was Kilowog’s turn to babysit the field trip.

“No, sir, our rings are clearly reading the planet’s trajectory.” The rookie started in on a long-winded explanation of how something passing through this system – possibly originating during the war of light most called Blackest Night – had affected the planets’ orbital trajectories in an adverse manner, but Guy ignored it.

Still towing Kyle – who was focused on his freely bleeding wrist rather than the planet apparently starting to break up underneath them – Guy checked his own ring.  The nearest planetary body was bearing down, speed increasing as the distance between the two masses decreased. 

“At current rate of acceleration, impact will occur in-“ the ring started.

“Shut up,” Guy told it.  There was more than enough time to get off the planet, although its nonsentient life could not be preserved.  Given the highly poisonous nature of most of what lived there, he wasn’t particularly distressed.  “Everyone out of reach of its gravitational well.”

“We’re just waiting on you, sir,” the same rookie told him, and Guy headed straight up. The almost horrified expression on the rookies’ faces as he arrived – disheveled, covered in mud, and towing his somewhat disoriented partner – almost made him laugh out loud, and he gave up trying to pretend there had been any semblance of success to the lesson.

Aiming for every scrap of dignity remaining, he gave them the glare that had been known to send raw recruits fleeing in something akin to terror. “That is how not to survey an alien planet.” 

None of the rookies so much as twitched; to a man, they hung in space and stared at him.

“Well? What are you waiting for? Report back to Oa.  Now!”  They finally moved at his shout, racing back towards home.  Guy heaved a sigh and followed at a more sedate pace.  “Next time, buddy,” he said, giving Kyle a significant look, “maybe you’ll think to wear gloves.”


	17. Routine Patrol

“Run.” 

The aliens in sector 018 should have been close enough to Oa that Green Lanterns were regulars in every inhabited system; Lanterns passed through all the time.  There were enough anomalies in it, though, that it had managed to grow and spawn this cesspool of a lawless planet.  Guy Gardner glared at the alien in question; it was small and purple, soft skin stretching over a round body.  It looked like a plush toy, nothing in its appearance hinting at the horrors beneath its skin.

“Fuck off,” he said, knowing that it was a useless show of defiance and that he would hop if it so much as it said toad. There was nothing else he could do, not with Kyle like that.

The alien laughed, small mouth stretching impossibly wide to show a double row of sparkling white teeth, giant glistening eyes squeezed shut in mirth.  “You Lanterns,” it said.  “You know what will happen if you do not run.”  For emphasis, it stroked a small rod dangling from a chain around its neck – one of many.  Some shone brightly, some were smoky and dark, others broken jaggedly partway down.  They clinked together as the alien moved, sliding under its three-fingered hand.

“Fuck off,” Guy said again, but he was meters away before the words left his mouth.  The sun rose over the mountains behind him, reddish light spilling over the rocky ground.  The alien laughed, the sound growing fainter as he ran.  The pale rock rose high on either side of this narrowest of paths, twisting and turning so that he could not see farther than a few steps ahead.

Fissures in the rock hissed as he passed them, sometimes spewing noxious steam and sometimes showing a glint of what might have been eyes deep within.  He could feel his heart pumping, blood flowing thick and strong through his veins, and his lungs heaving as they drew in oxygen and hurled out carbon dioxide.  This was easy enough, so far.  An insignificant weight hung at his waist; if he barely moved his hand, he would be able to feel the weapon that hung there.  A simple short knife, blade hammered out of pot metal and wired carelessly to a wooden hilt, was a poor substitute for his ring, but Guy Gardner was nothing if not resourceful.

“Just patrol Sector 018 until the rookie finishes training,” he muttered to himself.  “Oh, sure, Salaak.  Just until the rookie finishes and Krgze gets out of the infirmary.  Right. No rookie could’ve handled this.”  On the other side, he and Kyle hadn’t precisely handled the situation either.

The sun rose higher behind him, its rays lightening to orange and promising heat to come.  Guy ran faster; if he didn’t complete his objective before it stood at the apex of its arc, everything was over.

The first obstacle was a rockfall blocking the path; there was nothing for it but to climb over.  Guy scrambled through the stones, dislodging pebbles as he went.  None of them shook anything larger loose, and he slid down the other side in a hail of scree. 

The pace was too high to maintain indefinitely; he couldn’t move at a dead run forever, and killing himself under a desert sun wouldn’t help Kyle or anyone else.  The aliens had told him precisely where they wanted him to go, and he forced himself to set a pace that would get him there alive. If he’d calculated it correctly, he would be in plenty of time.

The color of the cliffs around him never changed, although the fantastic shapes rose and fell around him.  Sometimes he thought he saw a path that might lead to higher ground, where he might find a shortcut or a way to circumvent these damn aliens altogether, but it was invariably a dead end and he found himself back on the ground with nothing to show for his efforts but wasted time.  He couldn’t help trying, though, and hope inevitably fueled another attempt and another.

“Patrol the sector,” he muttered again under his breath.  They’d followed rumors of trouble, and really should not have been surprised when they found it.  Missing ships led them to a tourist-attraction ball of oddly-shaped gas – pretty, yes, but why would you go lightyears out of your way to look at it? – and there had been actual planets orbiting the star at the center of the nebula.  Kyle had let his ring give them an in-depth explanation of the stellar phenomenon, but all that Guy had gotten out of it was that planets might have made the gas go into funny shapes, which was clearly irrelevant.  Except that the shape then argued for the presence of planets, and that meant that perhaps there was uncharted territory in there.  “Fucking aliens.”

A river thundered through the canyon below him, bisecting his path neatly in two.  There was no way he could jump the gap – it was a good thirty feet across and the wind was blowing directly in his face.  Two towers of rock leaned towards each other, almost forming a bridge over the river fifty feet up and perhaps eighteen inches wide.  “Bastards.”  He didn’t have enough time to find an alternate route across.  Guy climbed the rock.

A fine powdery dust did nothing for his grip, and more than once during the ascent he caught himself by the barest of margins.  His arms were shaking by the time he pulled himself over the top, more from the height than the exertion.  A vivid image of the bus that had knocked him off a cliff – how many years ago had it been? – while he’d been Hal Jordan’s alternate bloomed behind his eyes, and he choked it down.  There were no buses here, no children to save.  The two-foot gap between the tips of the stones was a step rather than a jump, and he made it effortlessly.  Going down was another matter; he couldn’t see where he was placing his feet.  He’d gotten nearly to the bottom when a flaking ledge gave way and he swung wide. 

Physical training took over from reflex, and Guy managed to land on his feet and then to turn his momentum into a forward roll.  He came up running again, the sweat of not-quite-panic drying against his skin.  The sun rose higher in the sky, bathing it with the multi-colored light of the nebula as he raced against the clock.

Another half-mile gave him the reason for the knife.  The only native fauna of this particular planet appeared to be tiny little insects, living on lichens growing in the rocks.  They had actually been rather pretty.  The thing growing out of the ground in front of him was definitely not a local plant; its whippy branches writhed and spat lines of dark fluid, and there was nothing living around it.  The very rock had been pelted away, widening the path.  Guy watched it for a moment, to see if there was a pattern.  None emerged that he could see, so he tossed a rock at one side to test whether or not the plant would react to it. 

The rock produced no change in the plant’s pattern of movement, and Guy waited another moment before running through the twisting strands.  The knife warded off most of them until he was nearly clear, and the strike sent him sprawling.  He scrambled out of range, brushing the back of his head and tugging off his vest to make sure that the tree’s poisonous sap hadn’t touched him.  As far as he could tell, he was clean. 

The sun’s rays beat down on him as it approached its apex, and Guy redoubled his pace.  He was so close to his goal.  The white rock reflected the glare, blurring his vision, until he suddenly ran into shade.  He stopped, breathing hard, to look around.  The last obstacle was a maze, walls two meters high of thick smooth stone.  He smirked. 

Climbing the walls was almost too easy after the river, and he ran along the tops straight toward the green spark at the center.

_”You seemed to prize your jewelry,” the alien had said, after he’d regained consciousness. Kyle had gone down hard before getting a proper look at what had attacked them, and Guy hadn’t had time to make a construct at all. They’d both been pricked with a poison dart, right through their costumes. He’d woken to find himself bound and Kyle stretched out in the sand, unconscious with a ring of twisted metal wrapped around his head._

_“Fuck off,” he’d told it.  The alien had laughed, and told him that his ring was at the end of an obstacle course. If he made it through in time, he’d get it back.  If he refused, Kyle would pay his forfeit.  A chain holding several apparently glass rods was around the alien’s neck, and it selected one with a greenish tint.  Scraping its fingers down the rod produced convulsions in Kyle, and Guy had weighed his options._

_A camera would follow his movements, broadcasting to an audience somewhere nearby; the alien was making a killing on this illegal distortion of a game show.  He filed that bit of information away for further consideration._

_The alien obviously had no idea what it was dealing with; Kyle’s ring was still on his finger, but Guy couldn’t count on his partner waking up.  The quickest way to his ring was through the obstacle course.  “Fuck you,” he’d said to it, just for good measure.  It had smirked at him, purple skin barely even wrinkling around its small mouth.  Kyle had stopped twitching as soon as the alien had stopped touching the rod, and the alien had simply spoken a single further word._

_“Run.”_

The ring was under a glass lens mounted in an expanse of rock; as soon as the sun reached it, the magnified light would create enough heat to make most things catch fire.  The ring wouldn’t be damaged, of course, but he wanted to get at it before it was too hot to hold.   Guy snatched it away just as a pinpoint of light started to sizzle on the rock below, jamming it onto his finger.  Energy flooded through him, and the ring sparked.  He launched himself into the air and towards the aliens.

More darts flooded the air as soon as the alien camp came into sight, but he knew how they worked now, and the darts bounced harmlessly off a skintight construct.  Green light on the ground told him that Kyle was awake and fighting, and he swooped in to carry off the alien leader.

It gibbered in his hands as soon as he got it off the ground, making incoherent promises.  Guy held it there for a moment before asking politely who and what was involved in its little game.  He couldn’t do much about the audience – there were sick bastards everywhere who got off on watching other people suffer – but the entire production crew was on site.  Locking the alien into a construct, he returned to find Kyle had the situation mostly well in hand. 

“I got the leader,” he said, as they put the last of their catch into its restraints.

“I got the rest of ‘em,” Kyle retorted.  “You get to take them home.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”  He rubbed at his temples, though, so Guy took over maintaining the construct.  With any luck, this would be the most eventful part of their patrol. 

“Never a dull moment around you,” he said after a moment, when they’d left the brilliant nebula behind them.

“Ha,” Kyle retorted, and added to the prisoner transportation.   If he felt the need to take Guy’s hand to do that, Guy wasn’t about to complain.  He tightened his grip, making sure they all got safely home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are no plans for any further chapters.


	18. Sunset

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I, uh, found a thing. That hadn't been posted before.

“Salaak let Krgze patrol this by himself?” Kyle asked as they skirted yet another binary star. This particular pair was a brilliant bluish-white, although the smaller star was sliding toward the larger at an infinitesimally slow rate. Some time in the distant future, it would be consumed completely. Kyle almost envied the eventual successor to Krgze’s sector for the fascinating spectacle it would surely be.

“Ain’t no let about it,” Guy said, gaze roving through the starfield ahead of them. There had been reports of minor ships vanishing in this general area, although a better word for the source of their information might have been ‘rumor.’ No one had been willing to talk too openly, especially not to a Lantern. Guy had said that meant trouble, as if Kyle couldn’t figure it out for himself.

“Yeah, well.” Sector 018 was a problem sector; not like Earth, which attracted superpowered megalomaniacs like bees to honey, but in its sheer number of natural anomalies. Binary stars, while not uncommon, still made up the majority of 018’s stellar bodies, and most of the rest were ternary stars. Planetary nebulae were thick enough throughout the sector that flying a straight line was all but impossible. It was beautiful, though, and home to multiple inhabited systems. 

None of the vanished ships, all crewed by no more than four individuals, had been flying the same route or going in the same direction. Their point of similarity had been a detour past a particularly bright irregularly shaped nebula known throughout the sector for its beauty. Although many more ships had passed it perfectly safely, it was the only thing all the missing had in common.

“Heads up,” Guy said.

Reddish light flared in front of them, resolving itself into a spectrum that covered the rainbow and then some. Kyle paused, mouth hanging slightly open at the spectacle in front of him.

“Come on, rookie,” Guy said, although he was staring a little too. Kyle closed his mouth with a snap and followed his partner.

Not all types of ships left a readable emission in their wake, but Guy had been able to track three of them on their way in, and all three fell into a nearly identical path apparently calculated to view the nebula for maximum effect. 

“Safe bet the others came here, too,” Kyle said, but there was some kind of static over the ring. He pointed at it and frowned.

Guy shrugged. “Radiation,” he mouthed. “Not a problem.”

“How do you know?”

“Krgze’s still alive.” There was no grin to tell Kyle that Guy thought he was being funny. He shrugged back, and the static cleared.

“Is that normal?” he asked.

“You tell me, kid. You’ve got at least as much experience as I do.” That meant that Guy was nervous about not knowing exactly what was going on, which was enough to make Kyle a little nervous too, Torchbearer or no.

“Here.” All three trails ended abruptly, but not in the same place. They’d suddenly veered off course, towards the nebula. “Why would they go closer?”

“Looks like we’ll find out.” The edges of the nebula blurred as they got closer, its loops and whorls spreading out into translucence. 

“Guy, I think there are planets orbiting that star.” His ring had detected something, but with all the radiation in the air it was hard to tell whether or not it was anything as cohesive as a planet, much less one capable of supporting life.

“Can’t be. This sector’s been charted.” Guy was frowning, though, and Kyle was sure his ring was telling him the same thing. “It’s been charted,” Guy repeated.

“Apparently not.” The statistical probability of finding something the Guardians hadn’t known was there was so low as to be non-existent, but Kyle had learned early on that statistical improbability was largely irrelevant to both Earth’s cape community and the Green Lantern Corps. 

“Well, fuck.” One rule that seemed to hold true was that if something were to be responsible for making things vanish, it was probably not particularly friendly. “Okay, let’s go have a look.”

Without prompting, Kyle’s ring offered a flood of information regarding the formation of planetary nebulae and how they were affected by planets orbiting the star in question. “How would the planet be affected?” he asked the ring when it paused as if for breath.

“Unknown,” it told him. 

“Thanks.” It might have been glitching, rare as that occurrence was, but it was more likely that not enough inhabited planets had had nebulae form around their stars that the Guardians had found it worth studying.

Up close, the gorgeous color was much less dizzying than it had been; the effect was almost entirely lost, for which Kyle was grateful. It was hard enough tracking the maybe-planets through the gases and radiation of the nebula without the added distraction. Guy found the planets eventually – three of them, plus an asteroid belt that might have been a huge sphere at one point.

Two worlds could be immediately dismissed as being the source of any uncharted life; one was a field of barren white rock and the other was covered in a miles-deep ice field. The third planet was a mix of water and earth, with almost no cloud cover visible at all on the lit side. Guy pointed to it, and Kyle nodded. There were no radio waves or microwaves emanating from the planet, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Guy motioned toward the side of the planet facing away from the sun, and they approached slowly enough to not appear as a threat in the case of some sensor system they hadn’t thought to check for.

No lights were visible on the dark side of the planet; much of it seemed to be drenched in a torrential downpour under the thickest cloud cover Kyle had ever seen, although the center was perfectly still. It was a rather eerie effect, particularly when taken in conjunction with the violent storms raging through the twilight belt. The haze over the lighter side, when they got past the storms, was water evaporating from the oceans. 

“What the hell?” Kyle said.

“Weird,” Guy said, which wasn’t really an answer. “Really weird.”

“I don’t think there’s anything alive down there at all.” A more detailed look told Kyle that the center of the dark was colder than any place under an atmosphere had any right to be, whereas the center of the lit side was hot enough to immediately vaporize the surface of the oceans covering it. He was about to point out how the turbulent water rushed in from the cooler twilight belt where the rains must have constantly replenished it when everything went dark.

Light returned in the shape of sparkles against his closed eyelids. Gravity pressing against his hips and shoulders told him that he was on the ground, and the lack of bindings cutting into his wrists or ankles told him he was free to move. There was an odd tightness around his temples, but he ignored it. The ground smelled dusty, and he could feel wind against his skin, which meant he was more than likely outside somewhere. Footsteps paced the ground only in front of him; while that didn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility of someone behind him and not moving, it told him where a possible target was.

There was no sound that could have been Guy, but that didn’t mean he could make assumptions about his partner either. Kyle tensed his muscles and waited, slitting his eyes open just enough to see dark shapes pacing. He could see three, which matched the sounds of footsteps as far as he could tell. Then again, there could have been three or a dozen more walking around out of sight without his noticing anything different. There was nothing for it but to act. His ring was still on his finger, its warmth telling him that it was still charged.

There was no warning before he leapt towards one of the shapes; there couldn’t have been. He almost touched it before pain crashed through his head and he lost his balance. He managed to twist before hitting the ground, but it barely seemed significant against the roar inside his skull. It finally faded, and he pushed himself up to his knees. Hands shaking, he reached upwards to feel something clamped against his forehead, but his fingers cramped as soon as he brushed against it.

“There is no escape for you,” said the little purple alien he’d tried to strangle. Its oversized head, huge eyes, and small mouth looked almost comical, but he felt no urge to laugh. “If your friend succeeds in time, you shall both go free.” It gestured to a flickering image projected against the pale rock behind him, and he could see Guy running towards a huge maze. An hourglass – why that was a universal image, he could not fathom – showed him that Guy would never make it through the maze in time.

“You have no idea,” he said to it. “No idea at all.” It opened its mouth again, but the ring’s constructs could move at the speed of thought, and before it could speak, he had the device off his head. The pain remained, but he could move freely. A dart sailed towards him, the rush of adrenaline through his veins slowing it down almost gracefully. He blocked it, and the next, but the purple aliens rushed him en masse. 

For the next few moments, it was all he could do to keep them contained and away from him. By the time Guy appeared, grabbed what Kyle thought was the leader, and vanished, he thought he had it mostly under control. When Guy reappeared, all that was left was the cleanup. Kyle methodically destroyed all of the obscene equipment, working through the splitting headache; from what Guy told him, the alien had been broadcasting the efforts of its captives to make a profit. They were the Guardians’ problem now, though, and he was glad enough to take them to Oa and be done with it.

Handing them over wasn’t the end, of course, but he made the report to Salaak and escaped as quickly as he could. Guy was waiting for him in his apartment with tea and aspirin; where he’d gotten it, Kyle had no idea, but he swallowed it gratefully before leaning against Guy.

“The sunset nebula,” Guy said suddenly. 

“Huh?” Kyle blinked. The headache was receding, but he still felt almost like his thoughts were packed in wool.

“Why is it called the Sunset Nebula if it ain’t orange?” 

“That’s what’s bothering you?” Kyle started laughing, and Guy smacked him lightly. Never a dull moment, really.


	19. Independence

“What’s a Dyson Sphere?” Kyle asked, appearing over Guy’s left shoulder from out of nowhere.

“What do you mean, what’s a Dyson Sphere?” Guy answered. 

“What I just said.”  Kyle glanced around the table at the surplus of empty chairs and chose to drape himself over Guy instead, leaning forward to steal a fry.

“That’s an Earth word, you know,” Kilowog said.  “Most of us call it –“

“I know what _you_ call it,” Guy said, batting Kyle’s hand away. 

“I’m just surprised you have a word for it at all.” Soranik Natu recrossed her legs and took advantage of Guy’s distraction to steal her own fry.  “Hey, this is pretty good.”

“Cut that out,” Guy said, rounding on her, one finger raised in an admonitory shake.  Kyle stole the plate and took it to the other side of the table, straddling a chair backwards. “Oh, fuck off.”  There was no heat in his voice, though, and Kyle pushed the plate back.

“So what are we talking about?” he asked.

“There’s a Dyson Sphere in sector 3579,” Guy said.  “Hiding in a nebula. Wanna come see?”

“I still don’t know what a Dyson Sphere is,” Kyle pointed out.

“It’s a solar encapsulation module, not a Dyson Sphere,” Soranik said. 

“Not helping.”

“It’s a bubble around a star,” Guy finally explained, ringing a little diagram.  The sun in the center flared and sparked.  “See, a shell.”  A semi-opaque bubble surrounded the star, with little gates opening and closing to accommodate even tinier ships flying in and out.  “Swarm.”  The shell melted to thousands of tiny satellites whirling in complex orbits, until Guy flicked one of them with a finger and the entire system collided and exploded.  “Or a bubble.”  The remaining remnants of the satellites shifted into solar sails holding small payloads stationary around the sun.  “Got it?”

“Oh.” Kyle’s face cleared.  “Like Star Trek.”

“What’s Star Trek?” Soranik asked.

“Nothing,” Guy said.  “Earth thing. American.”  He turned back to Kyle. “You could have asked your ring, you know.”

“More fun to watch you twitch,” Kyle said cheerfully, but Guy figured it was just saving face.

“You coming?” he asked.  The fact that there had been disturbing reports of silence from the sectors on the edge of the galaxy had, of course, nothing to do with their field trip.  Guy knew subterfuge when he saw it.  Kilowog was under orders to do something and bring backup in case it went wrong, and whatever he was looking for didn’t get to be spread around to anyone else.  It was a little ridiculous, considering that Guy technically outranked everyone except for Kyle and Salaak. 

“Uh, rain check.”  Kyle gave him an apologetic smile. 

“We might find shit to blow up,” Guy offered.

“I don’t want to set historical ruins on fire,” Kyle said.  “They are ruins, right?” he asked into the following silence.  “Or are there people, um, thing—are they inhabited?”

“Hell if I know.” Guy grinned his most winning grin.

“I’m going to have to keep you out of trouble, aren’t I.”  Kyle nudged  Guy’s foot under the table.  “Okay, count me in.”

“Well, that was easy.”  Guy stood. “When are we leaving?”

“Dustoff in thirty,” Kilowog said.  “Shouldn’t take long.”

What Kilowog considered long would probably have been years by Earth standards, Guy figured, which meant the bar stayed temporarily closed – in an Earth business model, that would have definitely been problematic, but they weren’t technically making money on the enterprise anyway, just paying for the supplies – and Kyle had to explain again that no one got to touch the mural while he was gone.

“Your flight ring is not a toy,” Guy said, sneaking up behind Kyle in front of the Central Battery.

Kyle jumped, which was a satisfactory response.  “Like you have room to talk,” he said.  “Ready?”

“I’m already gone,” Guy said.

Reaching the edge of known space was something that would have awed Guy years before, but at some point it had become a matter of course.  Besides, Earth was practically on the edge of known space anyway, even if it was known all over as a trouble magnet.

“You ever been out here before?” he asked Kyle.

“Uh, once.” Kyle shrugged.  “There was this thing and then I got lost and there was another thing.”  He gave Guy a half-smile. “It was a long time ago.”

Ten to one it had had something to do with Parallax, Guy figured, but it didn’t really matter. 

The nebula was a brilliant turquoise from a distance, shading into green as they got closer and finally thinning mostly into invisibility once they actually entered it.  The effect was something like fog, thicker in some places than others, and it gave the star at the center a definite halo.

“That’s not a halo,” Guy said.

“It’s sparkling,” Kyle added. 

More things than had a right to ended up sparkly, Guy thought, the Dyson Sphere – or solar encapsulation module, or whatever it was called – not excepted.  “Is that glass?” he asked.  Most extraplanetary building materials tended to be opaque, so as to catch as much stellar radiation as possible and channel it into energy.  Conservation of resources all but dictated that nothing should be shiny or sparkly, and yet.

“Not glass.”  Soranik came to a stop and watched the sphere turn.  It was more of a metallic framework than a solid sphere, or a swarm of satellites; the huge structure was almost a net surrounding the star.  “But it’s beautiful.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Kilowog said.

Moving in closer, it was clear that the sphere was both old and abandoned; pieces were missing – in some places the net had clearly been struck by asteroids or other interstellar debris, and in others it looked as if bits had deliberately been removed.

“Why are we here?” Kyle asked in an undertone.  Guy shrugged in answer.

“There’s something alive in there,” Soranik called.  “More than one.”

“Move over.”  Technically speaking, Guy could have performed the scan from anywhere, but old habits died hard.  “Damn.”  There were several concentrations of life forms inside the network, totaling hundreds of thousands if not millions, and the ring had no information.

“How can you not have data?” Kyle was asking his ring, flicking it with his other hand.  “You’re connected to the central database. It’s been around for like, billions of years.” 

“It predates the database,” Soranik said, face straight.  Kyle started to nod, and caught himself.

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense.” 

Soranik grinned at him. 

“Shut up, both of you,” Guy said.  Several gates in the structure were opening. 

“Standard formation,” Kilowog said, and Guy found himself on the left flank with Kyle to his right.  Soranik was on point, looking vaguely unsettled, which left Kilowog to hold the rear. 

“Just smile and say hello,” Guy whispered, and she turned to give him a scathing look.

“I know the protocol.”  Whatever was alive inside the Dyson Sphere was mostly in two areas; one group in what Guy thought of as the northern hemisphere, and the other in the south.  The opening gates belonged to the southern group.   Soranik led them forward to meet the oncoming aliens.

What Guy initially thought to be seven individuals turned out to be seven ships, huge and gray.  They came to a halt, and after a moment the ring detected an attempt at communication.  It took a few minutes for the translation matrix to incorporate the language and start interpreting, which Guy knew to be outside the norm.  In theory, the translation matrix should already have had every known language in the galaxy.

“Who are you?” finally came through the rings, and Guy suppressed a shock.  There was no technologically advanced species unaware of the existence of the Green Lantern Corps, unless one counted people like the Daxamites (xenophobic and insular) but even they had some kind of awareness of things happening beyond their borders.  Furthermore, they didn’t build ships obviously capable of interstellar travel.  Guy knew an FTL engine when his ring scanned one.

“Soranik Natu, Green Lantern of Sector 1417.  This is Kilowog of Sector 674, and Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner .”  Introductions finished, Soranik waited expectantly, but no reciprocal information was forthcoming.

“Why are you here?”

“The Green Lantern Corps upholds order,” Soranik said.  “We’re just passing through.”

The following silence was long enough that Guy wondered if they’d been dismissed out of hand, or were possibly about to be shot.

“Please come on board to further discuss matters.” 

“We might as well,” Kyle said.  “This is first contact, right? It should be face to face.”

“You could say first contact,” Kilowog said.  “It’s been a very long time since the Corps has had this kind of situation.”

 _Unauthorized transport attempt blocked_ , Guy’s ring said, echoed by the other three.

“Please disable your safeguards.”  The aliens sounded impatient.  “You will not be harmed.”

“I was gonna say that,” Guy said.  “Let’s go in.”  His ring, at least, was synched with the central battery and a continuous record of his activities would be accessible up until the destruction of his ring.  He wasn’t sure whether Kyle was subjected to the same level of what the Guardians called observation and Guy called spying, but he occasionally tried to make whoever was watching twitch.  In this case, though, he was suddenly glad of the link.  “Ring, disable relevant safety protocol.”

The stars dissolved into white static and the blackness, and Guy opened his eyes.  He considered that a bad sign; waking up somewhere unfamiliar had never turned out well.  Almost never.  Gravity just a little heavier than that of Oa pulled him downwards, and the air was thin.  Neither effect should have made any difference as long as his ring was working properly, and the fact that he had to struggle to breathe properly told him the ring was gone before he checked.

Guy couldn’t help feeling his finger to make sure, but the ring was nowhere to be found.

Muttering a curse, Guy opened his eyes.  The room was bright, windows in the ceiling and two walls letting reddish yellow sunlight pour through opaque glass.  It was possible that the glass was tinted, but that was completely irrelevant, and he blamed Kyle that he’d had the thought at all.  Remembering Kyle gave him the concentration needed to pull himself to his feet, despite the room spinning.

“Guy!”  That was Kyle, right there, and a door he hadn’t seen opened.  “You okay?”

“Fine,” he said, and then had to grit his teeth against a wave of nausea. 

“The teleport was kind of rough,” Kyle said.  “If you sit down for –“ Guy gestured for him to shut the hell up, and after a moment both the dizziness and the nausea faded, although the air was still thin.

“Okay, what’s going on?” He suddenly registered that Kyle was wearing jeans and a paint-spattered button-down shirt.  A quick check told him that his uniform was gone as well; an old shirt with the Warriors logo and a pair of new jeans had been an odd combination, but clean clothes were clean clothes and his thoughts were wandering again.  “Where are my clothes?”

“Yeah, the rings.”  Kyle chewed on his lower lip.  “It won’t come to me.  And ‘Wog and Soranik aren’t awake yet.”

“Where. Are. We.” Guy did his best to glare formidably, but Kyle’s lack of response told him he wasn’t quite up to par.

“In the Dyson Sphere,” Kyle said absently.

“You ain’t helping,” Guy said, keeping his voice perfectly level by an act of sheer willpower.

“Look, I don’t know any more than you do. No one will talk to me. I found _you_ completely by accident, and I wouldn’t have found ‘Wog and Soranik without opening every door in the compound.”

“Have you actually seen anyone?” Guy asked.

“Well, no,” Kyle admitted, somewhat sheepishly.  At Guy’s impatient gesture, he continued.  “Okay, there’s a wall around where we are, it’s empty except for us, we have no rings, and there’s not a whole lot of space in here.”

“Right.”  Guy stepped out the door and the vertigo returned.  Above his head was the infinite black of space scattered in little snippets between a lacework of metallic corridors and the blazing brilliance of a reddish yellow star.  “What the hell,” he breathed. 

“Yeah, that too,” Kyle said, following him outside and carefully not looking up.  Guy couldn’t see the edge of their little corridor from where he stood; he picked a direction and started walking.

“It’s about eight blocks wide,” Kyle said helpfully, jogging to catch up. “Wider than it is long.  Do you think they’re all like this?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s really neat how it’s put together, I mean, there’s a whole world in here, and—“

“Kyle.” Guy waved a hand to shush his partner.  He’d been in one room in what looked like a single-family dwelling, complete with a garden.  The basic pattern was repeated in blocks throughout the cross-section, the sky too high to reach and the ground covered in dirt and pavement.  If he hadn’t known better – or if the sky had been blue – he might have thought himself on Earth. 

“Yeah?” Kyle was breathing harder than their pace accounted for, and so was Guy. 

“Go back and get ‘Wog and Soranik on their feet.”  As far as he remembered, Katma Tui hadn’t had any trouble with the Earth’s atmosphere, even when she hadn’t had a ring, so he was betting that Soranik would be able to breathe this air as well as he could.  The same went for Kilowog, or Guy hoped that it did.  He couldn’t shake a lingering fog around his thoughts.

“Right.”  Kyle jogged off, trying to pretend that he wasn’t having trouble with the lowered oxygen concentration.

Reaching the side of the structure, Guy found what resembled nothing so much as a high stone wall topped by a glass window.  The glass was thick, though, and run through with hundreds of tiny filaments, and the stone was just a little smoother he thought unworked stone should be and had little vents in it besides.  The sky was higher than he’d thought, although he wouldn’t have cared to guess a number, but what really caught his eye was the lattice of the sphere outside.

The Dyson Sphere was huge, fading farther into the distance than anything he’d ever seen.  So much detail was hard to take in, but it gradually began to resolve.  Close to where he stood, the corridors were narrow and almost delicate; in other areas, he could see larger enclosed areas, and at least one cage of tubes encircling a ship. It wasn’t one of the seven that had come to greet them, which probably meant that the aliens had a fleet.  Still, for all the intricacy, Guy could still see the gaping holes in the network; they’d noticed them before and now he could see just how extensive they were.  He shook his head and turned away; nothing was going to come of staring out a window.

What Guy was coming to think of as the outer stone wall led to an inner wall; it looked like worked stone, natural pieces fitted together without any kind of mortar or sealant.  As he got closer, he could see doors at regular intervals. Each door had some kind of panel next to it, set into the stone.  He reached the nearest door; it had no manual lever or handle that he could see, and wouldn’t open by tugging at the point where the two panels met.  He turned his attention to the panel; there were a number of colored buttons, labeled in an unfamiliar script.  Picking one at random, he pushed it.  When nothing happened, he picked another, and another.

“I tried that,” Kyle said, coming up behind him.  ‘Wog and Soranik were both on their feet, and looking remarkably well-adjusted to the atmosphere. Guy suppressed a stab of irritation.

“Well, did you try this?” he asked, and picked up a rock. 

“No, no, don’t do that!” Kyle said hurriedly, but Guy had already smashed the rock into the panel.  Sparks showered out and the door slid open to reveal an airlock surrounded by more of the unfamiliar script.

“You don’t want to open that one,” Soranik said after a moment. 

“Why the fuck not?” Guy demanded.

“Look.”  Soranik slipped past him and pointed at one of the myriad displays.  “See this?”  She traced a symbol; it looked like a small planet surrounded by several whirling moons.  “I think this is oxygen.”

“She’s right,” Kilowog interjected.  “See this here? Percent.  The atmosphere on the other side of that door is a vacuum.”

“Oh, fantastic.” Guy dropped the rock.  “Then what do you suggest?”

“Establish communication,” Natu offered. 

“We need to get the hell out of here.”  Kyle was carefully not looking at the sky.  “I can feel my ring, and it’s not that far away.”

“You can feel it?” Kilowog asked.

“You can’t?” Kyle looked at the rest of them.  “Seriously?”  At a headshake from everyone else present, he crossed his arms.  “Well, I can, and it’s that way.”  He pointed straight across empty space, towards the opposite end of their cross-section.  “I don’t know if they’re all there or what, but I don’t think we should stay here.”

“Yeah, who wants to be rescued,” Guy muttered.  The Corps would come looking for them if they were quiet long enough, and when it came to Salaak, ‘long enough’ probably equaled about five minutes after he wanted you for something.  He would rather get his ring back and solve the problem himself, thank you.

 Returning across the cross-section, the similarity to Earth was eerie.  The foliage wasn’t quite the right shade of green, and the trees weren’t quite the right shapes, and the houses were an odd blend of familiar and wrong.  It gave Guy an itch between the shoulderblades; he’d seen alien worlds and none of them had ever affected him this way.  Then again, none of them had been a bad copy of his home.  He picked up the pace, all but pulling Kyle towards the other door.

“Don’t smash it again,” Soranik said when they got there.  Guy put the rock down, pretending as if he’d had no such thought.

“What, then?”

“Try this.”  She pushed a long blue button, which produced no results.  She frowned and tried another, and then a succession of patterns.

“You can’t read that either,” Guy said. He hated being illiterate; the ring usually translated.

“Oh,” Kyle said, and reached over Soranik’s shoulder to press a small purple knob.  The door slid obligingly open.  “What?” he asked as three pairs of eyes stared.  “It says open.”

“You just guessed,” Guy said.  The script was as alien as it had been thirty seconds ago.

“No, it… my ring is different.”  Guy had forgotten about that; Kyle’s stint as the Torchbearer, the _only_ Lantern for so long, meant there were one or two fundamental differences between his ring and the other seven thousand odd that had been hammered out.  It wouldn’t protect him from fatal damage, but it wouldn’t run out of energy either, and apparently he didn’t need to be touching it for it to translate. 

“Lucky for us,” Guy said.  “So get the next door open.”

After a few moments looking over the myriad displays in front of the airlock, Kyle turned back with a helpless shrug.  “Okay, I’m stuck.”

Guy pointed at the screen showing atmosphere.  “It ain’t a vacuum, it’s got enough oxygen for us to breathe, barely, and the rest of it ain’t poisonous. Probably.”  He was going on barely-remembered college chemistry, but Kilowog backed him up on that.

“It’s breathable for all of us.  What does this screen say?”

The two of them working on getting the door open promised to be an exercise in frustration, so Guy moved away and left them to it. Soranik followed after a moment, glancing over her shoulder, but Kyle and ‘Wog didn’t even look up.

“What do you think?” Guy asked softly.

“I’m not sure,” she said.  “They should be trying to talk to us.”

“They should be.”  Guy looked at the patterned sky. “So I’m thinking, they don’t want nothing to do with us.”  A thought struck him.  “Hey, how come you speak English? ‘Wog lived on Earth for a while, but that don’t explain you.”

Soranik shrugged.  “I had the ring do an implant of several of the most common languages used by the Corps, just in case.”

“English ain’t one of ‘em.” Guy folded his arms.  “Spill.”

“It was for Kyle, all right?” She crossed her own arms defensively.  “Then I found out you guys were, you know.” 

“Sorry,” Guy said.  He wasn’t sure quite why he was apologizing, except that Soranik was a nice girl and it wasn’t easy to be in love with someone who didn’t return the feelings. 

“No, it’s okay.”  She gave him a tentative half-smile.  “Besides, it worked out here, right?”

“It’s open!” Kyle called out.

The other side of the airlock was a desert; yellow-white sands stretched across the cross-section, swept into dunes by a steady wind.  Heat radiated upwards, and Guy wondered if their boots might possibly melt.  “Do you think something lives in here?” he asked idly.

From the dawning apprehension on the others’ faces, the thought hadn’t even occurred to anyone else.

“I’m just _saying_ ,” Guy said. It wasn’t that far to the other side, and even if something _did_ live in the sand, it probably wasn’t hostile.

The heat hit Guy like a hammer as soon as he stepped through the door, but his boots remained intact.  Without looking to see if anyone else followed, he set a steady pace along the wall.  Kyle fell in behind him, carrying what looked like a large stick.  He shrugged and grinned somewhat sheepishly at Guy’s raised eyebrow; since Kilowog was carrying what might have been an entire tree, Guy ignored it. 

The sand gradually changed color, darkening to a burnt orange as they approached the other side of the cross-section.  There was no sign of anything alive, but Guy couldn’t help wondering.  The opposite cross-section had had a vacuum; why waste an environment on nothing at all? 

“It’s hot,” Kyle said, perhaps halfway across.  No one answered; the air was thicker here, but there was no moisture, and Guy at least didn’t want to waste the energy talking.  He was drenched in sweat, although he was of the opinion that it all should have evaporated by now.  Soranik was in no better shape, but Kilowog just walked on, infuriatingly unaffected by the temperature.

The question of what lived in that particular desert was answered less than twenty feet from the door – Kilowog was pulling Kyle ahead; apparently he didn’t like the heat any more than the rest of them, which gave Guy a small amount of satisfaction. The rest of him was too busy trying to ignore the sun.  It wasn’t working. 

“That one says –“ Guy could hear from ahead.  He turned to make sure Soranik was still behind him, only to see her staring off to his right with an expression of horror.  He followed her gaze, already knowing that he wasn’t going to see anything he liked.  There were times he hated being right, and this was definitely one of them.

“Work faster!” he snapped, grabbing Natu by the wrist and sprinting towards the door.  “Faster!”

“This isn’t—“ Kyle started, and Guy pointed at the thing rising out of the sand.  It was long and metallic, many-jointed body edged in long waving limbs.  An orifice on the tip opened, gleaming wetly, and a high-pitched shriek emerged.  The sand started rippling as far as Guy could see.

“Faster!” he said again, and Kyle wordlessly handed him the stick. “Great.” 

The worm swayed toward them, and the door irised open.  Kilowog shoved Soranik through, and then Kyle, and pulled Guy after himself.  “Close it!”

“I… it..” Kyle stared at the interior panel helplessly for nearly thirty full seconds as the worm got closer and little sharp protrusions appeared at the edges of every single appendage. 

“Now is good, Kyle, _now_!” Guy held the stick like a baseball bat, ready to swing it at the first piece of the worm that slithered through the opening.  He could see at least seven more behind the first one, each a slightly different shade of metallic silver, and they were getting faster.

Kyle slammed his hand down on one of the buttons and the door cycled closed. 

“Not fun,” Guy muttered.  “ _How_ much closer are we to your ring?”

“It’s just—“ Kyle started, and then their surroundings dissolved.  For a moment, Guy thought he had started to pass out, and he had just enough time for a wave of horror at his own physical weakness before the first cross-section reformed around them.

“They cheated!” Guy couldn’t help saying, but the words came out all garbled.

“We need a new plan,” Soranik said, once the world had stabilized into four walls and a set of windows.

“No shit,” Guy said under his breath, but she must have heard anyway, because she gave him the dirtiest look he’d ever seen on a Korugarian. 

“Can you hack the teleporter?” she asked Kilowog.

“Maybe,” he said. 

“We could try talking to them,” Kyle offered.  Several bottles of water sat on a table visible through the only door.  He collected them and tossed them back.  Guy caught his easily and drained it. 

“Why would we talk? They haven’t shown any interest in talking to us,” Soranik countered, sipping her own water.  “They’re clearly hostile.”

“Yeah, well, either way the Corps is going to show up,” Guy pointed out.  “Let’s not have to get rescued.”

“That worked so well the first time,” Kyle said, and the conversation degenerated.  Despite the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, Guy had Kyle pinned within mere moments, and then finally noticed that Kilowog and Soranik were apparently attempting to analyze the computers.

“You don’t think they could win, do you?” Kyle asked softly.

“Nah.” Guy gave him the cockiest grin he could manage.  “We took our safeguards offline. No one else is that dumb.”

“That does not fill me with confidence.”  Kyle stood and offered Guy a hand.  “We’d better go help.”

“Right.”  The computer made barely less sense to Guy than most of them; electronics weren’t really his area of expertise, and he didn’t care enough to do anything about it.  Usually.  Kyle knew even less than he did, though, which meant that Kyle being the only one able to read the displays at all slowed their progress considerably.

Then again, Guy wasn’t sure they were making any progress at all; he certainly couldn’t tell.  His own search – for something that could be used as or made into a weapon – was turning out to be remarkably fruitless; there was nothing sharp, which meant that the pocketknife he resolved to stop carrying on a regular basis was both their best bet for close combat and the reason there were several large staffs near the door.  Household chemicals were a bit better; the aliens had thoughtfully provided cleaning supplies, some of which could be remixed to make things that might explode.

“Soranik Natu Korugar.  Kyle Rayner Earth. Guy Gardner Earth. Kilowog Bolovax Vik.”

The screen in the wall activated, flickering to life above their heads, and the voice was so loud it shook the ground.  Guy snatched up his bag of possible grenades and his sharp sticks and stalked to where he could see the screen properly.  “What?” he snapped at it.

Empty static filled the screen itself, a shadow barely visible in the middle, and the aliens spoke again.  Unfortunately, Guy had no idea what they were saying.

 “We ain’t stayin’ in here,” he said, on the off chance that they could understand _him_ >.  “You don’t let go, our friends will come looking and it ain’t a pretty sight.”

The aliens’ reply sounded markedly less calm, but it was still unintelligible.

“Give the damn rings back.  Now.” 

What amounted to a speech answered him that time, at which point the other three drifted over.  Neither Kilowog nor Soranik looked any less confused than he did, but Kyle was nodding.

“Well?” Guy demanded.

“You can’t…” Kyle started.  “Right. Um. Well, they’ve been around for a while and there’s something about not violating their privacy, or their collection, and –“  
  
“The Collectors,” Kilowog said, a note of stunned revelation in his voice.  “They’re real?”

“I thought it was a story told to scare children,” Soranik added.

“Yeah, well, I thought Superman’s little zoo down in the arctic came from some idiots like these.”  Guy crossed his arms.  “We ain’t a part of any collection.”

Kyle shrugged.  “They said that since we know about them, we have to stay here.”

“Fuck that,” Guy said.  “Nobody puts Guy Gardner in a cage.  Or anyone else.”

“Cute,” Kilowog rumbled, probably thinking Guy couldn’t hear him.  Soranik just rolled her eyes. 

“Tell them we won’t betray their privacy,” she said, overriding Guy’s protests of he damn well would.

“They can understand what we’re saying,” Kyle said.  “They’re, um, listening _now_.”

“What, they didn’t pay any attention to us until we broke their little machine?” Guy snorted.  “They’re not helping their case.”

“You will be well-cared for,” came the alien voice, suddenly in English.

“Like hell,” Kilowog said. 

“We will not have our peaceful existence violated. The universe’s mad chaos spins onwards, beyond our doors, but we shall remain untouched.  We offer our apologies for your inconvenience, but we cannot allow you to leave.  Your knowledge of us is too volatile an unknown upon which to stake our privacy and our way of life.”  The voices sounded like windchimes, beautiful and incongruously harmonious. 

“Too late,” Kyle said, and a speck of green light rushed towards them.  It smashed through the window, leaving a construct behind to seal the gap, and Guy’s ring slid onto his finger.  He switched into his costume without sparing the transformation a thought, noting out of the corner of his eye that the others did the same.  “Worked through the remote control,” Kyle said, his ring flaring.  “Just took a little longer than I thought it would.”

“You can’t do this,” the aliens said, the sound of chimes now discordant with something very like shock.

“Watch me,” Guy said.  His ring could and did trace the source of the signal, and he started on the most direct route there.  Kyle stopped him.

“Not through the walls,” he said, and Guy rolled his eyes.  He smashed through the final bulkheads, though, and only left a construct keeping the atmosphere in as an afterthought.  The ceiling arched high overhead, thick glass letting the light pour in over perfectly ordered bluish green trees and shrubs.  The center of the huge room sported a circular array of screens and consoles at the bottom of a small amphitheater.  Cloaked and hooded shapes surrounded the equipment, and more milled around the layered benches.  The sound of windchime voices grew, and Guy amplified his own voice over the din.

“Let’s try this again,” he said.  “I’m Guy Gardner, Honor Guard of Oa.”

“Stand down.”

Blue skin and white hair could belong to no one other than a Guardian, but Guy knew he’d see that irritating combination even before he turned around.  To his surprise, four of the little blue Smurfs hovered just above his head, in the center of the cavernous space. 

“We mean you no harm,” the Guardians said, and Guy couldn’t tell if they were all speaking, or just one, or if they perhaps spoke in turn.  He hated it when they did that; it was just a mess of cheap theatrics.  He took a breath to speak, and they turned as one to glare at him.  He subsided, and they returned their attention to the aliens.  “We know of your existence, and of your attempts to preserve the variety of life.  Without your efforts, many forms of living being would no longer exist.”

“They kidnapped us,” Guy said, keeping his voice down.

“You were warned, after past indiscretions,” the Guardians said, apparently not paying attention. He looked at Kyle; if any of them could get the Guardians to listen, it was their Torchbearer.  Kyle shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I think it’s kind of cool. Like an interstellar zoo.” 

The kid was clearly hopeless.  Guy looked at Kilowog and Soranik. 

“They’ve got a lot of interesting technology,” Kilowog whispered.  “It could be useful.”

“I’d like to see what they’ve done with xenobiology,” Soranik added. “The Corps has a lot of data, but if they’ve been collecting aliens for however long it’s been, then they must have done some phenomenal analyses.”

“I am sorry.”  Guy blinked and his vision was filled with Guardian. 

“Sorry for –“ The world started slipping away, and he could feel the details of their encounter within the Dyson Sphere beginning to fade.  “You bastards, don’t you dare—“ The last remnant dissipated, and he didn’t know what he was trying to remember. He couldn’t see anything except the eyes of the Guardian, and those too faded into nothing.

A shock jolted him awake, and he bolted upright.  It was night on Oa, the green glow of the Central Battery streaming in through the window, and Kyle had been dislodged from his former position of clinging teddy bear.  “Guy? What’s wrong?” he asked sleepily.

“I…” There had been something he had tried to remember, the feeling that he was forgetting something incredibly important, or at least somewhat interesting, and something that someone had done.  None of it coalesced, except for the nagging feeling that he should be upset with the Guardians for something.  Then again, they’d pulled so much batshit crazy idiocy that it was hard to know what not to be annoyed about.  “I guess it’s nothing,” he said, and let Kyle pull him back down.  “Just a nightmare.”


	20. Disappear

“Everything on this planet is shiny. Did you notice that?”

“Yes, Guy.” Kyle peered around the rock wall.  There was no sign of their pursuers, but his ring chose that moment to helpfully inform him that its power level was less than two percent. He twisted it around his finger and didn’t poke the gash across the side of Guy’s head. “How do you feel?”

The two of them had been investigating the disappearance of a rookie Lantern twelve sectors away from where he’d been assigned; Kyle thought he knew now where the rookie had ended up, and it wasn’t pleasant.  The denizens of the planet the rookie had vanished from were xenophobic to a fault, and given the lack of surprise that had greeted their arrival, Kyle didn’t think there was much doubt as to what they’d done with the rookie.

“Shiny like Booster Gold’s ass,” Guy continued quietly, sliding down to sit cross-legged on the ground.

“What.” Kyle couldn’t help himself.  Disorientation due to concussion or no, Guy was getting weirder by the moment.

“You haven’t noticed? It’s –“ Guy sketched a shape in the air and Kyle tried not to think too hard about what he was outlining. 

“I haven’t – I can’t believe I’m saying this – I haven’t had much opportunity or inclination to notice Booster Gold’s ass.” Not something he’d ever envisioned himself saying, particularly as most of his experience with Booster Gold consisted of a fiasco involving the Justice League teleporters.  _Way to stay on topic, Kyle._

“Well,” Guy started, but Kyle caught movement past the ridge.

“Ssssh.”  A short scan with the ring revealed nothing larger than a coyote.  “Back to Oa, on my mark.”  As far as he could tell, they had enough power to get back home, but only if the locals didn’t start shooting at them again.  “Mark!”

“No, my name is Guy.”  Kyle nearly didn’t launch himself towards the sky, but Guy grabbed him by the upper arm and pulled him with, smirking.  “Gotcha,” he said.

“You,” Kyle started. “This is not the time to be fucking around.”

“I’ve got more juice left. C’mon in here and I’ll get us back. What’d we find out?” A bubble enveloped them both.

“You don’t remember?”

“The natives have big guns.  What happened to Kite?” Guy rubbed at the side of his head, flaking off the dried blood.  His skin was still discolored, but it was whole.

“If they welcomed him the same way they welcomed us, I don’t think there’s any doubt of what happened to him,” Kyle said.

“His ring,” Guy pointed out. “It didn’t return to Mogo for reassignment.”

Kyle opened his mouth, and then closed it. “Ring, scan for Green Lantern energy signature. Disregard Honor Lantern Gardner.”

Why he hadn’t thought to do that before, he couldn’t say. Kite’s ring had gone down to the planet’s surface and then he’d left again. Kyle couldn’t find any inhabited systems or planets along Kite’s detected trajectory, but he changed directions like a crazy man.  “Sort of that way,” he reported, pointing.

“Sort of?”

“Well, something’s weird.  He wasn’t going in straight lines as far as I can tell.”

“Rookie’s gone and caught space dementia,” Guy snorted.

  
“There’s no such thing as space dementia,” Kyle said. He’d never heard of any such thing.  Guy considered for a moment and then grinned.

“Naw,” he said. “I was just messing with you.”

“Time and place,” Kyle muttered, but he’d gotten used to Guy’s almost constant stream of not-quite-pranks.  He let Guy explain to Salaak that they hadn’t quite found Kite, and this time he brought his battery. 

“So,” he said, when they’d cleared Oa’s atmosphere.  “You were telling me about Booster Gold.”

“Wasn’t,” Guy said, giving him a suspicious sideways look.

“Yes, you were.  Something about a shiny ass.” Kyle put on the most innocent face he could, and let Guy decide whether or not that meant he was lying.

Guy scrubbed at his eyes.  “Thanks a lot. One more picture in my head I do not need.”  He stared balefully at Kyle without actually looking _at_ him. 

Kite’s trail was both more and less indirect than Kyle had thought; it looped and dipped enough to make anyone airsick, but it was headed straight for Earth.

“Why’s he coming here?” Guy muttered.

Kyle shook his head.  “Trail’s less incoherent,” he said.  “Like he knew where he was going.”

“He should know where he’s going. The entire – no, Kite was in the wave recruited after Sinestro.”

Allowing for planetary motion, the trail led straight for North America, which meant that either Hal or John was more than likely involved somehow.  What Kite had in common with either of them and why neither one had bothered to contact Oa about the situation, Kyle meant to find out. 

“Honor Guard to Sector 2814,” Guy said into the ring.  “Yo, Hal.”

“Sector 2814 unavailable,” said the ring, and a flash of green streaked by.

“Was that –“ The bottom dropped out of Kyle’s stomach; Hal was a good friend and a better Lantern, and with the hints of impending doom lurking around the cosmos lately, they needed him.

“Sector 349, searching,” came a faint transmission, and Kite’s ring was gone.

“Guy Gardner?” The voice through the ring wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, but Kyle couldn’t quite place it. 

“Speaking,” Guy said.  “Who are you and where’s Hal?”

“This is Green Arrow.  Hal Jordan is dead.”

There was no mistaking the body – not only was the face Hal’s (although there were clones and shapeshifters and it wouldn’t have been the first time a doppelganger was killed), but the ring was still securely on his finger. 

“He ain’t dead,” Guy said within seconds.

“You’re not looking,” Green Arrow growled.  Hal was at the end of a long furrow in the ground, as if he’d been knocked out of the sky and skidded.  A few feet farther sprawled an alien corpse – Kite.  The former rookie was bruised and battered. 

“I am looking,” Guy said.  “He’s got his ring on. He ain’t dead. Kyle.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kyle could see Guy placing Kite’s body into a construct, carefully sealing it. He knelt next to Hal. “Hello, Ollie.”

“That’s Arrow to you, kid.” Green Arrow crouched beside him, taking off his hat.

“And my name is Kyle.”  Hal _was_ still alive, just in something that looked almost like hibernation.  His heart was incredibly slow, and his breathing barely moved his chest.  Kyle couldn’t find a cause, either, not with the ring.  “We need to get him to Soranik, Guy. As soon as we can.”

“Fuck that,” Green Arrow said.

“You don’t even know who it is!” Kyle ringed Hal into a stretcher, trying to be careful about keeping his spine straight and his neck supported.

“I know that whoever you want to take him to is a lot farther away than the Watchtower,” Green Arrow snapped.  “Green Arrow to Dr. Midnite.”

“Do it, Kyle,” Guy said.  “I’ll get Soranik here.”

“The Watchtower it is.”  Kyle grabbed Green Arrow and dragged him along, too, making the trip to Justice League headquarters faster than he ever had. 

Guy wasn’t at the Watchtower when Kyle arrived, although unencumbered as he was, he should have been faster.  Kyle left Hal in the infirmary and Arrow to find Dr. Midnite, and stepped in the hallway to contact Guy.

“Kite’s ring,” Guy said, already sectors away.  “Something ain’t right here. I want the information off it.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“No, you stay with Hal. Whatever’s going on, he’s right in the middle of it.  Watch him.”

“Got it.”  Kyle peeked around the doorway to see if Green Arrow had come back yet, and Hal was gone.  “Shit.”

“What?” Guy asked.

“Hal. He’s not there.” He wasn’t anywhere in the room – Kyle checked everywhere he could think of, including under the bed.  Hal had vanished completely.

“How could he not be there?”

“I don’t know! I… I’ll find him. You get Kite’s ring.” His ring gave him Hal’s location as New York, which made it a quick trip but not impossible – if Hal had been healthy and conscious, which in no way resembled the mostly dead state he’d been in.

Flying down to New York was almost like going home; he’d lived there long enough that he could have made the trip in his sleep.  He’d been away long enough that the subtle changes were jarring; the skyline wasn’t quite the same and the signs were different and… Kyle shook his head.  According to his ring, Hal was right in front of him, down some alley in a not particularly good part of town, but he couldn’t see him.  It wasn’t until he nearly stepped on Hal’s ring that Kyle realized that he’d lost the other man.

He picked up the ring, slowly.  It was almost inert, gleaming dully in his hand.  It didn’t register its bearer as dead, but it also wouldn’t tell him where Hal had gone. Kyle turned to go and slipped in a puddle of liquid he didn’t really want to identify.  Whatever it was, it didn’t belong to Hal, and Hal couldn’t have gotten far.

A standard search pattern, non-invasive city variant, failed to produce Hal by the time Guy returned with Kite’s ring.  Kyle couldn’t kick down doors, and he couldn’t break in windows, but there were no signs that Hal had done either of those.  His League communicator’s homing beacon shone brightly once Kyle thought to look for it, in another alley two blocks over.  Guy found him with the beacon in his hand, frustrated.

“This should be on Oa,” Guy said.  For a moment, Kyle thought he was talking about the League communicator, but it was Kite’s ring that Guy meant.

“Hal is here,” Kyle answered.  He’d searched more city blocks than he could count, only to end up almost where he’d started with nothing to show for it.  “He has to be.” 

“Did you try asking the League to find him?” Guy asked, eyeing the communicator.

“This is Corps business,” Kyle said.  “Not League.  Kite makes it Corps.”  He wasn’t sure why that felt right, but it did.

“Earth makes it League,” Guy countered, and Kyle eyed him suspiciously.  Guy was the first person to loudly proclaim that he could handle it, whatever it was, and now he wanted to bring in the Justice League?

“Did you get anything from the ring?” It was a fairly obvious subject change, but Guy let it slide.

“Nothing unusual.”  Guy bounced it on his palm.  “Body should go to Soranik.”

“I’ll stay here and track down Hal.” Kyle took a deep breath. “Maybe the League can help.”

“Good boy,” Guy said, tousling Kyle’s hair. That sounded a little more like the Guy Kyle knew.

“I am not a puppy.”  He ducked away, brushing his hair back into place. 

“Keep in touch,” Guy said, and made tracks for Oa. 

Tracking down Soranik Natu was a simple matter, but getting her to stand still was a little more difficult.  “Hello, gorgeous,” Guy said to start, not leering.

“I don’t have time,” Soranik told him, and then he had to chase her across the city, opaque box in tow.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, when he managed to catch up. She had eventually returned to the city hospital, and he cornered her on the roof.

“Oh?” She gave him a once-over, and finally noticed the box.  “What’s that?”

“Rookie.”  He took her elbow and guided her inside and into an empty room.

“No one told me about a skirmish,” Soranik said, removing Kite’s remains from the box and placing it on an examining table.  “What’s going on?”

“No skirmish.”

“So what happened?” She was doing something arcane with what might have been a magnifying glass and something else that looked like a sharp stick.

“Don’t know.” Guy leaned against the wall.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she asked, glaring over her shoulder.  Her hands kept moving confidently, which was eerie enough that Guy switched his attention to her face.

“Fact – Kite here went haring off for no reason.  Fact – Kite ended up dead in a field across from Hal Jordan.” The ring had shown signs of erratic instruction, too, when he’d checked it, and Kite’s vitals hadn’t been quite within the norm for his species.  Guy had checked against the Oan database.  He added that, too, before Soranik turned back around.

“And what does Jordan have to say?” she asked, voice muffled.

“If we could find him, I could tell you.” It was just like Hal to not be there when he was needed for information, too.  Start a fight, and there he was.  Ask a question, and the man vanished faster than a snowflake on a bonfire.

“Just how much do you think I can tell you?” She turned back to the body.  “Don’t answer that and shut up if you’re not going to leave.”

Guy settled himself against the wall.  Visual aids and Soranik’s mutterings left him with absolutely no further idea what had happened to Kite, but he was patient.

“Quit fidgeting,” Soranik snapped.

“I ain’t fidgeting.”  He tucked his fingers under his arms. 

“Kite didn’t die of natural causes,” she said finally.  “You see that?”

Guy couldn’t tell what she was pointing at, but he nodded impatiently anyway. “What about it?”

“Signs of a systemic viral infection.”  She pointed somewhere else.  “There, concentrated in the brain.”

“He was possessed by an alien virus?” Guy hazarded.

Soranik blinked.  “I’m not sure I would use the word possessed, but if nothing else the level of infection means that he would have been severely compromised.”

“Is it contagious?”

“No, and that’s the strange thing.  You can see here that there are definite signs of viral infection, every signs except an actual virus.  I can’t find one.”

“Despotellis?” There were stranger things than a sentient virus, Guy was sure, but he’d seen it and what it had done to far too many Green Lanterns.  Despotellis had been a Sinestro before a smaller-than-life Green Lantern had supposedly defeated it.  “You don’t think it’s Leezle Pon, do you?”

“No, neither one.” Soranik shook her head.  “This is something else.”

“How do you _know_?”

“I know, all right?” She eyed him.  “Do you want specifics?”

“No.”  He eyed the remains.  “Is the virus what killed him?”

“I don’t think so.”  Soranik started closing the incisions she’d made, neat stitches for neat cuts. “Or not in the traditional sense.  His heart just stopped.”

“Stopped.”

“A common trait among most races is the heart, you know.”  She finished the first incision and moved on to the second.  Guy hadn’t known that.  “And its regular beats are due to electrical impulses.”  That was something he vaguely remembered from high school biology.  “The part of the brain that should have controlled that was dead.”

“Something fried his brain.  He was possessed by this alien virus and it fried his brain.” Guy stalked towards the door.

“You’re oversimplifying.”

“Doesn’t matter. I need to know where it went.” Guy paused, hand on the door.

“It’s hard to say, but it was most likely transmitted by touch, or some kind of exchange of fluids.” Soranik paused.  “Airborne and there would have been traces left on the skin or the clothes.”

“Why would it all be gone?” Guy asked, not really expecting an answer.  Soranik shook her head.  “Where… oh, no.”  Where else but straight into Hal, which put Kyle in danger.

“Make sure that ain’t contagious,” he said, and ran for the clear.

“It isn’t,” Soranik said, and he was surprised to find that she was right behind him.  “What’s going on?”

“Whatever that was got Hal,” Guy said, and her eyes widened as she connected the dots.  Oa shrank behind them.  “And Kyle’s chasin’ him,” Guy added.

“Soranik Natu to Lantern Rayner,” Soranik said into the ring.  “Exercise extreme caution.  A possibly contagious viral infection may have spread to Lantern Jordan.”

“Plague?” came the prompt reply.  “Is Guy with you? Hal went straight for New York City. If there’s some kind of infectious disease, we’re going to have global complications.”

“We don’t know yet,” Guy interjected.  “Just be careful.”

“Thanks,” Kyle said wryly, and severed the connection.

“Why are you people always right in the middle of trouble?” Soranik asked.

“We’re Lanterns,” Guy said.  “It’s part of the job description.”

“No, I mean your sector specifically.” Soranik arched an eyebrow.  “The four of you.”

“Nonsense.”  Guy gave her his best grin, but she wasn’t looking. “No such thing.”

“And yet, here we are, again.” Was she laughing at him?

“Again? You’ve only been out this way once.” Earth was almost in sight now; the center of the multiverse and attractor of trouble, not that he was going to agree with Soranik out loud.

“And if that wasn’t trouble, I don’t know what is.”  She _was_ laughing at him, but there was an edge of worry to it, and he couldn’t blame her. 

“Rayner to Lantern Natu.”

“We’re just entering your atmosphere now, Kyle. What did you find?” Soranik gestured to Guy to shush and not interrupt.  He stuck out his tongue, but she still wasn’t looking at him.

“It isn’t an epidemic. Yet.” Kyle hesitated. “There’s another body.”

“Virus?” Guy asked.  They were above the Atlantic now, approaching the city.

“Murder. Someone knifed this guy.”

“What makes you think it’s related?” Guy slowed, scanning the city for Kyle’s ring.  It wasn’t more than a few blocks away now.

“He’s wearing Hal’s jacket.” Kyle’s last couple of words came both through the ring and across the few remaining feet separating them. A police cordon encircled a few square feet of pavement, the yellow tape fresh and bright.  A lone car, siren silent but lights flashing, sat just at the edge of the tape, and Kyle was talking to a uniformed cop near the car.

“Officer,” Guy said.  The cop nodded to him – living in any major city in the continental United States meant that one got used to capes pretty quick – but gave a start at Soranik’s odd-colored skin.  She smiled reassuringly, and he looked back at Kyle.

“He hasn’t been here long,” Kyle said, gesturing towards the body.  “Less than an hour.”

“Is that how long he’s been dead?” Soranik asked.

“I couldn’t tell you without the coroner,” the officer answered. “It might take a while.”

“Allow me.” Soranik stepped forward.  The officer half-raised a hand in protest.

“Ma’am,” he started.

“With all due respect, this is our jurisdiction,” Kyle interrupted. 

“How can you be sure?” It was a reasonable question on the part of the police, but Guy had lost any semblance of patience.

“He’s—“

“Shut up, Guy.”  Kyle was crouched over the body. “Soranik, would you look at this, please?”

She ducked under the bright tape and walked towards Kyle, careful not to disturb anything.  “What is it?”

Wordlessly, Kyle pointed to a bruise along the man’s jaw.  The blow had to have occurred hours before, judging by the level of discoloration, but in the midst of it, the imprint of a Green Lantern ring was clearly visible.  “Bet it matches Hal’s,” Kyle said in a low voice.

“You don’t think Hal Jordan killed this man,” Soranik said, keeping her voice just as low.

“It’s not like he hasn’t done something like this before,” Kyle said hesitantly.  “Remember Parallax.”

“But why would he use a knife?”

Kyle hesitated for a moment and then pulled a second ring out from inside his glove.  “I found this earlier. It’s his.”

“I will perform an autopsy.”  Soranik crouched by the body.  “All I can tell you here is that he hasn’t been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.”

“Aliens get rigor mortis too?”

“Muscle kinetics are similar all over the known galaxy,” Soranik replied absently. “What’s your standard basal temperature?”  She nodded upon hearing the answer.  “This man has indeed been dead for less than one Earth hour.”

The politics on Earth were primitive with respect to most of the populated planets Soranik had visited; she had to wait while Kyle kept Guy Gardner from speaking and obtained permission to use the city’s facilities to conduct their investigation.  When he finally got it, a brief conference resulted in Guy continuing to search for Hal Jordan and Kyle accompanying her to the city morgue, along with the dead man.  There had been nothing out of the ordinary in the alley where he had been found; the blood on the street matched the victim and there was no sign of projectile weaponry.

The law enforcement personnel of the city had ensured Kyle that they would continue to investigate the area for anything pertinent to the case, which Soranik found somewhat mystifying.  Surely there was nothing they could find that she and Kyle could not; a look at Kyle told her that it was Earth politics again, so she didn’t say anything.

“Anything you can find that tells us this isn’t Hal would be very welcome,” Kyle said, still keeping his voice too low for anyone else to hear.

“But he’s a Lantern,” Soranik said. “If he’s done something wrong, then he goes to Oa for sentencing.”

“Yeah. Um. Not quite how… anything you can find.”

What she found was not quite what she had expected; she’d barely begun her analysis when the same signs of infection that had been present on Kite showed up in the dead human. She filed the facts and continued.  Again, no sign of the virus itself was present, but this time the cause of death had clearly been the large hole caused by a sharp object thrust over and over into the human’s torso.  Foreign matter lodged under his fingernails proved to be human skin, but to her surprise, it did not belong to Hal Jordan.

“Kyle,” she said through the ring.

“Well?” he said.

“Hal Jordan may not be responsible.”

“That’s good to hear, because I have another body for you.”  He sounded worried, and tired.  “This one was strangled. I don’t know if it’s related or not, but there’s a straight line from where I found Hal to the dead man and now to this one. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“I’ll come to you.”  She set a construct around the human body; not that it was still contagious, but she didn’t want anyone else touching it. Not yet. “I found signs of infection,” she added.

“The virus?” Apparently Guy had filled him in on the details.

“Absent.” She zeroed in on his ring and ignored the crowds that gathered underneath her as she flew. Were Lanterns so rare a sight here? Apparently.  Perhaps it was only that she lit up the night sky.

The second body was a woman, one of her four-inch stiletto heels broken.  Soranik noticed the shoes immediately, although they seemed irrelevant.  It took her another moment to see that there was a fresh scratch along the woman’s face.

The ring confirmed quickly enough that the skin under the dead man’s nails had belonged to the woman sprawled half in, half out of the river.  Soranik pulled the woman completely to dry land with a construct, ignoring the human protests and Kyle’s attempts to defuse them. She knew enough now to check for signs of the virus without cutting the body open, and she found precisely what she had expected.  The virus, or ghost, or whatever it was, it had infected this body as well.

“The man who killed this woman.” If she could just get a sample of whatever had been inside the woman, she could set her ring to locate it.

“What about him?”

“Our virus has jumped to him, although I don’t know if virus is the right word.”  She ran her hands through her hair, pushing it out of her eyes.  “It’s possible that something jumped from Kite to Jordan to the dead man to this woman.”

“Something? Jumped?” Kyle shook his head. “Okay, I’ve heard weirder. So where is it now and what’s it doing?”

“I don’t have all your answers!” She was tired, if she was snapping like that.  So was Kyle, if he wasn’t immediately seeing that the virus had gone into a new host. She took a deep breath and continued.  “It has to be in a new host, Kyle, but I don’t know what it’s doing.”

“Right.”  Kyle stared at the body for a moment and then looked around, moving his hands in odd little gestures as if to orient himself against something.  “Next incident, somewhere that way.”  He pointed straight across the river.  As if on cue, an explosion of green light bloomed just beyond his pointing finger.

“Gardner to Natu. And Kyle. Get your asses over here.”

Soranik was off the ground before Gardner had said her name, but she was still a heartbeat behind Kyle.  The green light faded as they flew, but Gardner himself was a bright beacon.  The warehouse he _had_ been inside was nothing more than rubble, any merchandise that had been in it nothing more than charred ash.  A perfectly normal human stood across from him, wielding a long pipe.  As Soranik watched, the human swung the pipe and Gardner caught it.  Kyle barreled into the human and threw himself clear, binding the human with a construct.

“They don’t take!” Gardner shouted, and the human leapt through Kyle’s constructs as if they weren’t even there.  Something hard and sharp in hand, he clipped Kyle across the face and Kyle dropped to the ground.  The man put a hand on Kyle’s chest, moving fluidly to kneel beside him.  Gardner grabbed him from behind and threw him into a wall, but the man just got back up.

“Hold him down!” Soranik heard herself shout.  She could see the virus inside this man, now that she knew what to look for. It infested his brain, tendrils wrapped around the nerves responsible for motor control.  If she could get close enough, she was sure she could pull it out.  Gardner picked up a long board and pinned the man against the wall before he could move more than a few inches.  “That’s it, you bastard,” Soranik said. 

With a convulsive shudder, the man stopped struggling and the virus inside changed.  The man’s eyes lightened from dead black to gray and finally faded to white, and Soranik could see the virus withering. 

“I think you can let go,” she said, scraping up rubble to boxing the man into an airtight container and watching the virus. “But I need whatever it is that they can come up with to keep this quarantined.”

“Kyle –“ Gardner started, looking at his partner.

“Interstellar pandemic,” Soranik said. “Go!”

With another look at Kyle’s prone form, Gardner sped away.  Soranik couldn’t let the construct go, not if the virus could move through the ring’s projections, nor could she let her concentration waver.  She edged over to Kyle, keeping one eye on the dead man.  Kyle’s pulse was strong, and his breathing was regular, and that probably meant he would be fine once he woke.

Gardner returned with some kind of box and humans wearing odd yellow suits, and between them they put the dead man into the container. Somewhere during the procedure, Kyle groaned and woke, and shortly thereafter he and Gardner vanished. Soranik ringed the container upwards.

“If that’s a biohazard –“ started one of the humans.

“I do not believe it will affect your planet further,” Soranik told him.  “This is our jurisdiction now.”  She didn’t take the container to Oa – if the virus escaped there, it could wreak real havoc – but there was a satellite orbiting an uninhabited planet not far away, with training facilities.  She left it there to make her report, locking the building down.

“…given that it seemed to be impervious to our constructs, I can only conclude that this is a weapon designed specifically to counter Green Lanterns,” she said.  Salaak had set her in front of the Guardians, apparently feeling that the situation warranted reporting directly to them.  “I need to do further research to figure out how to counter it.”

“Why do you believe Lantern 349 went to Earth?” a Guardian chimed.  She could barely tell them apart, and she had no idea which one of them had spoken. She took a deep breath. 

“I believe that the rookie Kite deliberately sought out Earth in an attempt to get help from its superhero community.  Earth is well-known for its… colorful population.”

“That will be all.”  The Guardians dismissed her in unison, and she had no choice but to leave.

“What about –“ she asked.

“It is taken care of. That will be all.”  She was standing outside the closed door before she could blink. 

“Taken care of?”  She whirled on her heel and stalked out of the building.  The human body in its quarantine container was gone when she returned to the facility, with no sign that it had ever been there.

“Hey, Natu.”

Gardner was leaning against the door behind her.  She glared at him. “What?”

“I thought you might like to know I found Jordan.”

“Is he…?”

“He’s alive.”  Gardner motioned her to follow, and they flew slowly back towards Oa.  “The first guy we found hit him with a rock, but Jordan’s too stubborn to die. He dragged himself to the nearest hospital.  No memory of Kite, or the guy as nailed him.  The JLA’s got him now, but they think he’ll be fine.”

“But if he had this virus and he survived, I need to –“

“Don’t,” Guy interrupted.  “I already asked, and there’s nothing weird left. At least, not according to the League.”

“The Guardians won’t let me investigate this. I don’t like it.”

Gardner hesitated.  “If they say it’s been taken care of, it probably has been.  Just… don’t mess around in this, Natu.”

“Why not?”

“I…” He hesitated again, face guarded.  “I shouldn’t say this to anyone, least of all you.  Little blue bastards didn’t want to tell me, either, but Guy Gardner doesn’t take no for an answer.”

“Well?” she prompted when he paused yet again.

“The idea was to create a weapon to use on the Sinestros, but it barely got off the ground.  This was an early experiment that must’ve gone screwy somewhere.” 

“Biological warfare?” Soranik was horrified down to her core.  No thinking population would ever consider use of microorganisms to strike at an enemy – there was no way to limit their effects.  The involvement of noncombatants and casualties on one’s own side were inevitable.  “Why would the Guardians…?”

“I dunno, and they ain’t doin’ it now. The project is dead.” He looked quite sure of himself, so much so that Soranik found herself believing him.  “Go say hi to Kyle. Kid’s got a monster of a headache and gets bitchy if he doesn’t get enough attention for it.”

Soranik smiled, and visited Kyle, and avoided the subject of the warehouse, because if she couldn't trust the Guardians, then she would have to call all of her choices into question. Soranik believed in herself too firmly for that, or at least she hoped she did.

Really The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, NOW there are no more plans for further chapters. Really, this time.


End file.
